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THE GENESIS OF 
HAMLET 



BY 



CHARLTON M. LEWIS 

Emily Sanford Professor of English Literature 
in Yale University 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1907 






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Copyright, 1907, 

BV 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

Published November, 1907 



THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



PREFACE 

This essay presents the chief new results of 
a prolonged study of Hamlet with a succession 
of college classes. I became convinced long 
ago that the only hope of solving the Hamlet 
problem lay in a clear discrimination between 
Shakespeare's original contributions to the 
story and the legendary materials that he in- 
herited. This plan has never been fairly tried, 
because it has heretofore been thought impossi- 
ble to distinguish these heterogeneous elements. 
There are, however, plenty of clues, and it is 
necessary only that they be intelligently fol- 
lowed. I have here pointed out the most promis- 
ing of these, and followed them as well as I 
could. There have been so many false starts 
towards a solution of Hamlet that no new ad- 
venturer can expect all his conclusions to be 
acceptable; but I am confident that I have hit 
upon a sound method of investigation, and that 
by the same method others will succeed where- 
ever I may have failed. 



iv Preface 

All the texts necessary for my program of 
study are in the Appendix volume of Furness's 
invaluable Variorum Hamlet. After Dr. Fur- 
ness, I am chiefly indebted to A. C. Bradley's 
Shakespearean Tragedy and F. S. Boas's edi- 
tion of Kyd's Works. Tanger's article on the 
German Hamlet is in the Shakespeare Jahr- 
buch for 1888. Creizenach is copiously quoted 
by Tanger, and I have ventured to cite him at 
second hand. The original text of the German 
play is easily accessible in Cohn's Shakespeare 
in Germany. Belleforest's novel is compara- 
tively rare, and I have myself been unable to 
consult it; but the translation in Furness is 
vouched for as literal by Capell, Elze, and 
others, and it was amply sufficient for my pur- 
poses. 

I have received much assistance from many 
of my students, both from their acumen and 
from their perplexities ; and I am sorry that 
specific acknowledgments are impracticable. 

C. M. L. 

New Haven, August, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Theory of Coleridge .... 1 
The play explained by defects in Hamlet's 
character. This theory partly explains the 
pretence of madness. It breaks down, how- 
ever, under Hamlet's early adoption of that 
pretence. 

II. Werder's Theory 10 

Theory that Hamlet's difficulties are exter- 
nal. Too summarily dismissed by Bradley. 
Yet not wholly sound. Divers objections con- 
sidered. Werder at least compels a reconsid- 
eration of Hamlet's character. 

III. The First Quarto 20 

The inconsistencies of the play suggest ex- 
amination of all versions. Character of 
First Quarto. Its variant readings clear up 
minor difficulties. Inconsistency of religious 
and ethical assumptions in Hamlet. Miles's 
theory of the pirate capture. Shakespeare's 
effort to justify Hamlet. 

IV. Kyd and Belleforest 36 

The pre-Shakespearean Hamlet was by Kyd. 
Based on Belleforest's novel. Summary of 
the novel. Explains mystery of Claudius's 
succession. The murder not secret. The pre- 
tence of madness not illogical. Hamlet's dif- 
ficulties wholly external. 



vi Contents 

PAGE 

V. The German Hamlet 47 

Is the German play based on Shakespeare or 
on Kyd? Latham's theory. Objections of 
Creizenbach and Tanger refuted. Proof of 
derivation from Kyd. 

"VI. Kyd's Hamlet 64 

Light on Kyd's lost play from two sources. 
The Spanish Tragedy; Kyd's idea of revenge. 
The German Hamlet; Kyd's treatment of the 
murder and the pretence of madness. Early 
adoption of the pretence justified. Difficulties 
external. 

VII. Shakespeare's Hamlet 77 

Shakespeare's methods in general. Slavish 
adoption of Kyd's plot, freedom in interpreta- 
tion. Suppression of external difficulties. 
Evolution of Hamlet's character. Is Hamlet 
insane? Is he incapable? Shakespeare's efforts 
to humanize the story. 

VIII. Shakespeare's Hamlet, Continued . . 95 
Intrusion of the ethical element. Popular 
conception of Hamlet. Hamlet's instructions 
to the players. Death of Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern. "To be or not to be," and the 
thought of suicide. The last soliloquy and the 
journey to England. The "tragic fault" in 
Hamlet. 

IX. Ophelia 112 

Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's closet. Did he 
love her? The story is imperfectly told. The 
German version. Kyd's version. Explanation 
of Shakespeare's version. 

X. Summary 128 



THE GENESIS OF HAMLET 



THE GENESIS OF HAMLET 

CHAPTER I 

XLbe Gbeorg of Colerioge 

Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, and scores of 
others are agreed that Hamlet is a man some- 
how unfitted by nature for the task laid upon 
him. This view has been widely accepted for 
a century, and though students of the subject 
have differed about many details, the great ma- 
jority have united in viewing the play as the 
tragedy of its hero's inefficiency. The difficul- 
ties that confront Hamlet are difficulties in his 
own nature, and another sort of hero — an 
Othello, for instance, or a Laertes — might have 
attained a complete revenge before the begin- 
ning of the second act. This theory I shall 
for convenience call by the name of Coleridge, 
its subtlest and best-known expounder ; but it 
must be remembered that I use his name only 



2 The Theory of Coleridge 

for convenience, and that many details of the 
theory have been developed far beyond his orig- 
inal conception. 

This theory sees in Hamlet a man of wide 
and keen intellectual powers, but feeble will ; 
and his feebleness of will has resulted directly 
from over-development of his intellect. A per- 
son of small mental calibre may be quick in 
decision and headstrong in action, just because 
the thing to be done takes complete possession 
of him and robs him of the power of thought. 
A man of larger mental endowment will con- 
sider and reflect before he acts, because passion 
and volition cannot usurp entire dominion 
over his reflective faculties. Carry the develop- 
ment farther, let the intellectual habit gain 
complete ascendency, and the man will not act 
at all; his will-power is suffocated by reflection 
and contemplation. 

In such a case, according to Coleridge's view, 
is Hamlet. He is enjoined to avenge his 
father's murder. A simple act is required of 
him, an act which a narrower man might per- 
form straightway; but in Hamlet's mind such 



The Theory of Coleridge 3 

illimitable vistas of speculation are opened up 
that his will shrivels before them. Though rec- 
ognizing his plain duty, and though feverishly 
eager to do it, he cannot force himself to action. 
Thus he fritters time away in reflection and 
introspection till at last he himself is involved 
in ruin, and dies the victim of his own moral 
paralysis. 

This theory, like other theories, affords a 
beautiful explanation of some difficulties of the 
play, but collapses under the weight of others. 
I will make a test case to illustrate both its 
strength and its weakness; and to make the 
test as decisive as possible I will apply it to the 
most crucial problem of the play, the problem 
presented by Hamlet's pretence of madness. 
And I must remark first (with perhaps an ex- 
cess of caution) that this problem is not to be 
confused with the question whether Hamlet is 
really mad, as some flat-footed critics have 
thought. Whether he is mad or not, he cer- 
tainly sometimes pretends to be; and we learn 
from the second act that he began his pretence 
soon after he learned of the murder. 



4 The Theory of Coleridge 

Now why did Hamlet do this ? Here I repeat, 
is the crucial problem of the play. The story 
was doubtless suggested by the old Roman tale 
of Brutus, who feigned idiocy to keep Tarquin 
from suspecting his patriotic ambitions. This 
was a fairly plausible story, and one's first 
guess is that Hamlet had a like purpose. 
On second thought, however, no such purpose 
seems to fit Hamlet's situation. He had been 
perfectly sane up to the time when the play 
opens — a charming and beloved young gen- 
tleman, the observed of all observers. If he 
now suddenly begins to act like a madman the 
effect will not be to allay suspicion, for Claudius 
has as yet no suspicion at all. All that is 
needed to keep suspicion from rising is for 
Hamlet to remain quiet. If what Hamlet wants 
is a chance to kill Claudius, his peculiar conduct 
will certainly hinder more than it can help. 
Whatever he wants, it is hard to see any ad- 
vantage in such behavior. 

In fact, of course, it was just Hamlet's 
pretence of madness that proved fatal to his 
design. Claudius became suspicious of him as 



The Theory of Coleridge 5 

soon as his irrational conduct began, and set 
spies upon him to find out his motive. Instead 
of letting his suspicions be lulled to sleep, he 
redoubled his vigilance. The pretence of mad- 
ness proved a silly mistake; and one won- 
ders that Hamlet's extraordinary intelligence 
failed to foresee the inevitable issue. What- 
ever we think of Hamlet, we cannot think him 
stupid. 

But here comes in the explanation by Cole- 
ridge's theory. Hamlet's pretence becomes in- 
telligible when we assume the morbid weakness 
of his will. He has a restless desire to do some- 
thing, a desire that will not be put down; but 
even to satisfy this desire he cannot force him- 
self to decisive action. Instead, he hits upon 
this clever device. By feigning madness he 
appeases his desire for action and so salves his 
conscience; he enjoys the sense of achievement 
without actually achieving anything; and es- 
pecially he avoids committing himself irrev- 
ocably to any further steps. Moreover, the 
pretence of madness affords a safety-valve for 
his pent-up feelings, for he can now give vent 



6 The Theory of Coleridge 

to hysterical irony without restraint, whenever 
passion reaches the boiling-point. But of 
course, so far as his main purpose of revenge 
is concerned, the plan is useless; it leads 
nowhere. 

This explanation not only grows naturally 
out of the Coleridgean theory of Hamlet's 
character, it also tends strongly to confirm that 
theory ; for it is hard to find any other explana- 
tion of the facts. But there is a flaw that 
seems to me to ruin the whole structure. 

In the last scene of the first act we have Ham- 
let already resolving upon this pretence of 
madness. Within five minutes of the Ghost's 
disappearance he has gathered his friends about 
him and administered a solemn oath: 

Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, 

How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, 

As I perchance hereafter shall think meet 

To put an antic disposition on, 

That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, 

With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake, 

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, 

As "Well, well, we know," or "We could, an if we would," 

Or "If we list to speak," or "There be, an if they might," 

Or such ambiguous giving out, to note 

That you know aught of me. 



The Theory of Coleridge 7 

Moreover, Hamlet has shown in soliloquy 
just before this passage that the course of dis- 
simulation to which he looks forward is to be a 
long one. The Ghost leaves him in a high pas- 
sion, but his first thought is not that he will 
seek immediate vengeance, it is rather that he 
will never forget that vengeance must be his; 
he solemnly resolves to dedicate his whole life 
to the achievement of his purpose. 

Now it seems to me that if the pretence of 
madness were due to Hamlet's inefficiency it 
would be presented as a course into which he 
drifted slowly. If, after repeated vain efforts 
to lash himself into action, he had conceived 
this device in despair, it would be comparatively 
easy to understand him ; but it is very doubtful 
psychology to present him as resolving upon 
it at once, in the white heat of his first wrath 
and vindictiveness. The whole effect of the 
passage, in the light of Coleridge's theory, is to 
suggest that a train of thought passes through 
Hamlet's mind something like the following: 
"I am now resolved to bend all my energies to 
this task and to sweep to my revenge with 



8 The Theory of Coleridge 

wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of 
love; but I know my own nature and am well 
aware that this heat will hardly last overnight. 
I foresee that I shall never really do anything, 
and that sooner or later I shall have to devise 
some way of salving my conscience and relieving 
my pent-up emotions. What shall I do? About, 
my brain ! By heaven, I have it ! As soon as 
my feelings grow too strong for me I will 
begin to feign madness in a hysterical, ironical 
fashion ; and I will now swear my friends not 
to betray me, no matter how long the silly game 
keeps up." 

Is not this utterly false characterization? 
Hamlet elsewhere more than once resolves upon 
action ; why, then, at this moment of first and 
highest tension, should he so elaborately re- 
solve upon long delay and ineffectual palter- 
ing? The whole trend of the scene seems to 
reduce to absurdity the Coleridgean hypothesis, 
with its subtle explanation of the feigned mad- 
ness. Shakespeare could not have designed the 
main lines of this scene with any such intent as 
that hypothesis imputes to him. 



The Theory of Coleridge 9 

The theory is fraught with other difficulties 
in plenty. I have chosen to emphasize this 
particular one partly because, so far as I know, 
it has not hitherto received attention, and 
partly because it will be of importance in later 
chapters. For the present I ask the reader 
merely to note that while Hamlet's pretence of 
madness seems explicable only by the theory of 
Coleridge, his almost instantaneous resolve to 
make the pretence seems quite inconsistent with 
that theory. I may add also that whatever 
modification of the theory be adopted, whether 
the "sentimental" view of Goethe or the "moral" 
view of Richardson and others or the "melan- 
choly" view ably presented by Professor Brad- 
ley, the same difficulty confronts all who 
attribute Hamlet's difficulties and delays to 
internal causes ; for they all must find him, at 
the end of the first act, with incredible swift- 
ness and spiritual energy foreseeing and pro- 
viding for his own spiritual impotency. 



CHAPTER II 
TKHerfcer's Gbeorg 

The difficulties of the Coleridgean interpre- 
tation are so great that a precisely opposite 
one has recently gained some favor. Professor 
Werder and some others have maintained that 
Hamlet's troubles were chiefly external. Ham- 
let himself does all that can be expected of the 
ideal hero of romance, but Ins task is impossible. 
To feel the force of this theory we must first 
consider what, according to Werder, this 
task is. 

Hamlet is not commanded by the Ghost to 
"kill Claudius," he is commanded to "revenge 
his father's murder." There is no word of kill- 
ing, and according to Werder mere killing 
would not answer the purpose at all. Hamlet 
must make a public exposure of the villain and 
force him to confession and restitution. To 

rush upon him at some unguarded time and 
10 



Werder's Theory 1 1 

thrust a knife into his back would be easy, but 
would it satisfy justice? The world must know 
the story. Claudius must suffer something 
bitterer than an instantaneous death, and Ham- 
let himself must be established on the throne. 

Hamlet's purpose therefore is to right the 
wrong, not merely to force an exchange of 
blood for blood. He is slow to find a way be- 
cause no way is to be found. Claudius is all- 
powerful and strongly entrenched, and Ham- 
let has no evidence. If he assassinates his uncle 
and pleads the Ghost's behest, who will believe 
him? The world will impute his act to ambi- 
tious jealousy, and will speedily send him the 
way of all regicides. The play is not the trag- 
edy of inefficiency, but the tragedy of heroic 
endeavor in the face of insuperable obstacles. 
Hamlet succeeds, indeed, in forcing from Clau- 
dius himself abundant corroboration of the 
Ghost's charge, but he pays for his success with 
his life. 

This theory, I repeat, has recently found 
some favor, but I think it has not found quite 
all the favor it deserves. Professor Bradley 



12 Werder's Theory 

allows it very short shrift. "From beginning 
to end of the play," he says, "Hamlet never 
makes the slightest reference to any external 
difficulty. . . . Not only does Hamlet fail to 
allude to such difficulties, but he always as- 
sumes that he can obey the Ghost." And hence 
Bradley declares, "No theory will hold water 
which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay merely, 
or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, 
in external difficulties." 

But if Hamlet "always assumes that he can 
obey the Ghost" and never is himself conscious 
of external difficulties, how are we to explain 
the passages cited in the last chapter? The 
first thought that comes to Hamlet, when the 
Ghost has left him alone with his tremendous 
responsibility, is that it will take him a life- 
time to discharge it. If the difficulties were 
"wholly or mainly" internal, he might have 
reached this discouraged state of mind after 
much experience of his own vacillation and in- 
firmity, but that he should reach it in one jump 
suggests that his difficulties are at least "to a 
considerable extent" external. To my mind the 



Werder's Theory 1 3 

proof is conclusive that external difficulties 
were part of the poet's scheme when that partic- 
ular scene was first conceived; and I am there- 
fore obliged to admit that Werder's theory is 
at least entitled to respect. 

Yet I am not able to dispute Professor 
Bradley's main conclusion after all. A survey 
of the whole play detects sufficient evidence to 
demolish Werder's theory. I have quoted only 
two of Bradley's arguments, and I think that 
in stating those two he has overlooked some im- 
portant matters; but he has other objections 
in overwhelming force. 

Why does not Shakespeare show us the ex- 
ternal difficulties more clearly, if he has them 
in mind? When he gives any direct hint as to 
external conditions, they seem quite opposed to 
the demands of Werder's theory. Has Clau- 
dius any partisan supporters at court? None 
appear save the dotard Polonius. The people 
are ready to rise at a word from Laertes ; and 
it was Hamlet, not Laertes, that the people 
especially loved. If we were weighing historical 
conditions we might not be sure that Hamlet 



14 Werder's Theory 

could have succeeded; but the conditions are 
not historical but fictitious and dramatic, and 
we may be sure that if Shakespeare had seen the 
facts as Werder saw them he would have pre- 
sented them differently. He would have laid a 
strong dramatic emphasis on the King's polit- 
ical and military supporters. 

Moreover, the habitual secrecy of Hamlet's 
proceedings is against Werder. The play that 
was performed before the King, by Hamlet's 
grim humor dubbed the Mouse-Trap, afforded 
a rare chance to unmask the villain. If Ham- 
let's difficulty were lack of evidence, could not 
he have turned this performance to some ac- 
count? Might not judicious hints have made 
the test as significant to others as it was to 
him? But he not only made no effort to turn 
the Mouse-Trap to account, he never even 
thought of making such an effort. His whole 
design was secrecy. Horatio was his one con- 
fidant, and the play was devised to satisfy his 
own mind alone. It may be remarked, also, 
that the Ghost had been as studious of secrecy 
as Hamlet himself. 



Werder's Theory 15 

The fact is that Werder's idea, — the idea 
that Hamlet seeks justice rather than brute 
revenge, — is a purely modern importation. In 
such plays as Kyd's Spanish Tragedy we see 
what the Elizabethan meant by revenge. He 
meant the letting of blood for blood, the grati- 
fication of a savage instinct. Shakespeare 
might of course have entertained the broader 
conception, but the main body of his tragedy 
shows that he did not. The chief difference be- 
tween Shakespeare's conception and Kyd's is 
this : Kyd thought of revenge as a dominating 
and controlling passion, while Shakespeare pre- 
sents it as seemingly incapable of absorbing 
Hamlet's whole nature. Hamlet is sometimes 
under the influence of the passion and some- 
times not ; but when he is, it is the mere savage 
thirst for blood — by no means Werder's long- 
ing for larger justice. 

Finally, among the host of objections that 
may be urged against this theory, we may fall 
back confidently upon the pretence of madness. 
As we have already seen, Hamlet's early resolve 
to make this pretence, and his evident expec- 



1 6 Werder's Theory 

tation that it will last long, count in Werder's . 
favor; but why should he make the pretence 
at all? Even Werder has to recognize that the 
pretence has no objective value; it is a mere 
safety-valve for Hamlet's agony, for the agony 
caused by his acute and shuddering sense of the 
awfulness of his position. 

But would a man of sense and healthy will- 
power be so unhinged by external difficulties? 
Werder has to assume that Hamlet's attitude 
towards his task is like that of the modern 
symbolist towards the burden of life's mystery, 
and thus the pretence of madness still remains 
essentially pathological. This is so generous 
a concession to the Coleridgeans that Werder's 
own theory becomes largely nugatory. He 
would have us regard the play as portraying 
a situation impossible for any man to cope with ; 
yet he admits that our interest is excited in 
the hero chiefly by the hysterical and sentimen- 
tal way in which he faces that situation. The 
plot might have been outlined by Dumas pere, 
but the filling-in and the characterization were 
dreamed by a Maeterlinck. 



Werder's Theory 17 

Still, in spite of the insuperable objections 
to his theory, I think we are under great obli- 
gations to Professor Werder. Taking a new 
view of the play (even though, on the whole, 
an inaccurate view) he has seen and clearly 
shown some features of Hamlet's character 
and conduct to which Coleridge had blinded us. 
He has, for one thing, especially emphasized the 
fact that Hamlet does not delay very long. 

There are only two considerable intervals of 
time between successive scenes in Hamlet. Be- 
tween the first and second acts we have to as- 
sume an interval to account for the return of 
the ambassadors from Norway, for the arrival 
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and perhaps 
for the need of sending remittances to Laertes. 
Again, somewhere in the fourth act, there is an 
interval while Hamlet goes to sea and returns. 
Everywhere else the acts and scenes follow one 
another in rapid succession. 

But even these two necessary intervals are 
minimized. As to the first, it is to be noted that 
near the beginning of the second act we hear 
of Hamlet's first assumption of madness, in 



1 8 Werder's Theory 

Ophelia's account of his disordered dress and 
erratic behavior. This seems like an immediate 
sequel to the resolution taken in Act I. The 
things that suggest lapse of time are the af- 
fairs of other persons. We are told later, very 
indirectly, that two months must have elapsed; 
for whereas in Act I the elder Hamlet had 
been not two months dead, in Act III Ophelia 
says it is "twice two months." But who is con- 
scious, between the two appearances of Ham- 
let himself, that a long time has elapsed? And 
the second interval is made as brief as possible. 
The sea-voyage is short. Hamlet writes to 
Horatio that the pirate capture was made "ere 
we were two days old at sea." He had started 
immediately after the Mouse-Trap, and he 
comes straight back. 

There is no long delay here. We cannot 
say there is no delay at all, or that Shake- 
speare does not want us to observe it, for Ham- 
let's soliloquies are full of unrest and impa- 
tience; but there is no reason why we should 
blame him for it overmuch. The talk of pro- 
crastination comes wholly from Hamlet him- 



Werder's Theory 19 

self. I think we may fairly concede to Werder 
that Hamlet does all we can reasonably require 
of him. Even if we reject the notion that his 
difficulties were chiefly external, and say that 
he had none save the difficulty of making up 
his own mind, can we feel that he was unreason- 
ably dilatory about it? The matter was a 
very grave one, and could not be decided off- 
hand. 

We may therefore find a partial satisfaction 
in saying that, while Hamlet's difficulties seem 
chiefly internal, they are such as any man 
might feel. He is not slower in making up 
his mind than any intelligent hero might be 
permitted to be; and we cannot unhesitatingly 
condemn him as bringing ruin upon his own 
plans by culpable procrastination. For so 
much light upon the play we may cordially 
thank Professor Werder, even if it involve 
straining some minor points in his favor; but 
still, what are we to say about the pretence 
of madness? That remains the knottiest diffi- 
culty of the play, for it still seems to convict 
Hamlet of shuffling incapacity. 



CHAPTER III 
Zbc 3ffrst Quarto 

The difficulties that confront any theory 
about Hamlet induce at last a belief that no 
single theory is admissible — that neither the 
play nor the character is a consistent whole. 
Such a belief comes slowly, for we are deeply 
convinced that Shakespeare knew his men, and 
that if they seem unintelligible or impossible 
the blame should be ours, not his. He was 
often a careless workman, but we trust the 
truth and fidelity of his dramatic vision; and 
we cannot always be sure that we have fairly 
sounded the depths of his meaning. 

But in the case of Hamlet we are on safe 
ground. There are certain circumstances 
under which even Shakespeare might go astray ; 
and those happen to be just the circumstances 
under which Hamlet was composed. If Shake- 
speare elaborated a character not in one heat, 



The First Quarto 21 

but at intervals extending over one or two 
years, he might easily lose hold of the concep- 
tion with which he started. So it was, for 
instance, when he revived Falstaff for The 
Merry Wives ; he gave us something very good, 
but by no means the identical Sir John of Gads- 
hill and Shrewsbury. Or, if, instead of rearing 
a drama out of his own invention, Shakespeare 
merely rewrote or repolished a tale already 
told, perhaps already dramatized, he might 
easily alter part of the significance of his plot 
or his characters, and yet retain passages and 
traits that harmonized only with the older 
meaning. Instances of this are numerous and 
familiar. 

Now when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet he was, 
in fact, merely rewriting an older tragedy; 
and he rewrote it not all at once, but by in- 
stalments. The older tragedy is lost, and 
therefore, while many scholars now recognize 
that Shakespeare's play is an imperfect fusion 
of diverse elements, the task of separating them 
and so displaying the genesis of the play has 
heretofore been thought hopeless. I believe 



22 The First Quarto 

that much may be accomplished by careful 
analysis, and it is to this task that I now ad- 
dress myself. 

The so-called First Quarto, the earliest ex- 
tant edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet, was 
printed in 1603, but an entry in the Stationers' 
Register seems to show that the play was acted 
as early as July, 1602. The Second Quarto, 
issued in 1604, bore on its title-page the asser- 
tion that it was "newly imprinted and enlarged 
to almost as much again as it was." The 
assertion was true, for while the First Quarto 
has but little more than two thousand lines, the 
Second has nearly four thousand. The First 
Quarto is wretchedly printed. It is apparently 
the work of a piratical publisher who, being 
unable to secure a manuscript copy from the 
players, employed stenographers to take sur- 
reptitious notes of a performance. The volume 
is therefore a very imperfect reproduction of 
Shakespeare's first version of the play; but 
that it does purport to reproduce such a ver- 
sion, and not the completed tragedy, is now 
the universal judgment of scholars. So atro- 



The First Quarto 23 

cious is the misprinting that we must be cau- 
tious in examining this Quarto; we cannot 
always be sure what we owe to Shakespeare 
and what to the publishers ; but an examination 
will be profitable nevertheless. 

In the first place, there are in Hamlet many 
unimportant difficulties of detail up6n which 
the First Quarto throws much light. I will 
begin with some of the most trivial, because 
they happen to be the clearest illustrations. 
In the completed play Polonius asks Ophelia 
whether she has given Hamlet any hard words 
of late, and she replies: 

\ 

No, my good lord, but, as you did command, 

I did repel his letters. \. 

Now Polonius, in this version of the play, 
had not given this command, but in the earlier 
version he had. The First Quarto reads : 

Ofelia, receive none of his letters, 

For lover's lines are snares to entrap the heart. 

Instead of this, the revised version has made 
Polonius say: 



24 The First Quarto 

From this time 
Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence: 
Set your entreatments at a higher rate 
Than a command to parley. 

Now it is of course utterly unimportant that 
Ophelia should quote a command which did not 
appear to have been given. We cannot, of 
course, dignify the fact by calling it a blun- 
der. But the First Quarto shows that it was 
a little slip, and shows, too, how it happened. 
Shakespeare expanded and altered the prohibi- 
tions of Polonius, and did not observe that the 
rejected lines were needed to secure perfect 
logical coherence. 

In the "nunnery" scene Ophelia makes an- 
other interesting little slip. She brings back 
the trinkets Hamlet has given her, saying: 

Take these again; for to the noble mind 
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 

This is perhaps not unintelligible, but it is cer- 
tainly rather odd. Ophelia has been repelling 
Hamlet's letters and refusing to speak with 
him ; and she herself supposes that he still loves 



The First Quarto 25 

her passionately and that her harsh treatment 
has driven him mad. Is it like her simplicity 
and straightforwardness to say now that the 
unkindness is his? We can make nothing of 
this until we examine the First Quarto, in 
which we read as follows: 



Of el. My lord, I have sought opportunity, which now 
I have, to redeliver to your worthy hands a small remem- 
brance. 



Hereupon Hamlet breaks in with his bitter 
invective against the dishonesty of beauty, 
ending with "I never gave you nothing;" and 
Ophelia, bewildered and dismayed, says: 

My lord, you know right well you did, 

But now too true I find 

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 

Her feeling is natural enough; but in his 
second version Shakespeare transposed these 
speeches, putting Hamlet's scolding after 
Ophelia's protest ; she laments his unkindness 
before he has been unkind ! Doubtless Shake- 
speare thought it better to finish quickly the 



26 The First Quarto 

talk about the love-tokens ; and of course it is 
no wonder that he overlooked the slight impro- 
priety involved. 

There is a curious complexity in the religious 
assumptions of the completed play. Most of 
the first act, with its real Ghost and his talk of 
purgatorial fires, is conceived in the spirit of 
medieval superstition. For the purposes of the 
play, ghosts and purgatory must be accepted 
without reserve. At the end of the second act 
Hamlet for a moment doubts whether it was 
really his father's spirit that he saw; but the 
alternative supposition is that it was the devil; 
for the devil has power to assume a pleasing 
shape and may be angling deceitfully for Ham- 
let's soul. In the third act Hamlet thinks of 
killing his uncle at prayer, but refrains because 
he is unwilling to send his soul to heaven. He 
will wait till he finds him "drunk asleep or in 
his rage," and then will despatch him straight 
to hell. As if one could save or damn the soul 
of another by appointing the time for his tak- 
ing-off! With judicious circumspection we 



The First Quarto 27 

ourselves could be more efficient saviors of souls 
than all the missionaries. 

So far as these instances show, Shakespeare's 
imagination is moving in a world bounded by 
the narrowest superstition of medieval Cathol- 
icism, and Hamlet is presented consistently in 
character. Yet in another familiar passage 
this same man is querying whether there can be 
any life beyond the grave. To die is to sleep; 
but whether in that sleep dreams may come, 
who knows? The hereafter is the undiscovered 
country from whose bourn no traveller returns. 

This interesting inconsistency need occasion 
no wonder, for Shakespeare, even under other 
circumstances, might have been guilty of it; 
but in this particular case the circumstances 
of composition were chiefly responsible. In the 
First Quarto Hamlet's soliloquy begins as 
follows : 



To be or not to be, ay, there's the point. 

To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all? 

No; to sleep, to dream; ay, marry, there it goes, 

For in that dream of death when we awake, 

And borne before an everlasting Judge, 

From whence no passenger ever returned, 



28 The First Quarto 

The undiscovered country, at whose sight 
The happy smile, and the accursed damned. 



This passage gives a fair sample of the 
printing of the First Quarto. I have modern- 
ized the spelling and punctuation, but many of 
the lines remain obviously corrupt. As Shake- 
speare wrote them, for example, we can hardly 
doubt that it was the "everlasting Judge," 
rather than the "undiscovered country," at 
whose sight the happy smile and the accursed 
are damned. Yet it is clear enough that the 
Hamlet who uttered the soliloquy was the same 
medieval man that heard the Ghost's revela- 
tion, suspected the agency of the devil, and 
would not send a villain's soul to heaven. It 
was only later, as Hamlet became the mouth- 
piece for some of Shakespeare's own maturer 
reflections, that the agnosticism of the Second 
Quarto crept in. Shakespeare was then touch- 
ing up a character conceived two years earlier. 

Toward the end of the play, when Claudius 
has been seeking Hamlet's life, and it is clear 



The First Quarto 29 

that Hamlet must act quickly if he will save 
himself, he refers to Horatio the question 
whether it is not right to kill. 

Does it not, think'st thee, stand me now upon — . . . 

is't not perfect conscience 

To quit him with this arm? 

This speech is the main stay of certain critics 
who believe that Hamlet's trouble throughout 
the play was a moral scruple. He was stout 
enough of heart and will to kill Claudius at any 
time; but was it really right for him to take 
upon himself the vengeance of the Eternal? 

Professor Bradley rejects this theory of the 
play, and, I think, rejects it properly. As he 
pertinently asks, if that was Shakespeare's 
meaning, "why in the world did he conceal that 
meaning till the last act?" So much, indeed, 
has been urged against this theory that I need 
not review the arguments here; I will remark 
only that it is especially open to the objections 
urged against the Coleridgean theory in the 
first chapter. It certainly cannot be accepted 
as a satisfactory explanation of the play. 



30 The First Quarto 

Turning, however, to the First Quarto, we 
find that Hamlet's remarkable question about 
"conscience" is not there at all. Moreover, it 
is fairly clear that the omission was not the 
printer's or stenographer's fault ; the speech 
was not written till Shakespeare revised the 
play, for it occurs in a wholly new scene. It 
is an integral part of the scene in which Ham- 
let tells Horatio of the fate of Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern ; and in the First Quarto Horatio 
receives the information by letter. 

It appears, therefore, that in the first ver- 
sion Hamlet was not troubled with moral 
scruples ; they formed no part of Shakespeare's 
original conception. But when he rewrote the 
play, the question what Hamlet really ought to 
do had begun to interest Shakespeare, and he 
naturally represented it as interesting Hamlet. 
This is a matter of somewhat more importance 
than the slips considered hitherto, and I shall 
return to it in a later chapter. 

In the completed play, Hamlet's letter to 
Horatio tells of the sea-voyage and the pirate 



The First Quarto 31 

capture. The odd phrasing of the letter sug- 
gests that perhaps the capture was not acci- 
dental, but prearranged by Hamlet. Miles 
points out certain lines spoken by Hamlet to 
his mother, before his departure, as tending to 
confirm this suggestion: 



For 'tis the sport to have the enginer 
Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard 
But I will delve one yard below their mines 
And blow them at the moon. Oh, 'tis most sweet 
When in one line two crafts directly meet. 



And we remember Hamlet's last utterance 
before he embarked: 

Oh from this time forth 
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth. 

These last lines are almost an absurdity, if 
we accept the ordinary interpretation of the 
play. Hamlet utters his strongest expression 
of resolute vindictiveness just as he is turning 
his back upon his task perhaps forever ! Such 
silliness seems beyond even the Coleridgean 
theory of his character. But if we may under- 



32 The First Quarto 

stand that he knows his uncle's purposes, that 
he is complying with them only in appearance, 
and that he had a definite plan in mind when 
he uttered those vague hints to his mother, then 
the whole story of the sea-voyage becomes fairly 
intelligible. 

Now neither of the passages quoted above 
is in the First Quarto; nor is the pirate cap- 
ture narrated there. The letter to Horatio 
says that Hamlet's ship has encountered ad- 
verse winds, that he has been set ashore and 
has returned safe to Denmark, and that his 
companions have gone on to England. The 
change of plan is utterly unexplained; we can- 
not discover why Hamlet was "set ashore" or 
why his guards have abandoned him. 

Shakespeare evidently saw the weakness of 
this when he was making his final revision. It 
would not do, having started Hamlet towards 
England, to bring him back without explana- 
tion. Some story must be concocted to account 
for his separation from Rosencrantz and Guil- 
denstern. Accordingly Shakespeare invented 
the device (rather lame, to be sure) of bringing 



The First Quarto 33 

up a pirate ship to capture Hamlet and carry 
him home. 

Now the objection to Miles's theory is that 
it seems a little far-fetched. It is dangerous 
to construct elaborate theories upon detached 
hints. But here, in one sense, the hints are not 
detached; they are a group of new elements 
which were all introduced together. When 
Shakespeare was revising his play he inserted 
the letter telling of the pirate capture, and 
at the same time he inserted Hamlet's promise 
to his mother that he would outwit the adver- 
sary, and also his parting resolve to be bloody 
from this time forth. This consideration adds 
appreciable weight to Miles's argument. 

I do not care to maintain, however, that the 
pirates were hired for the occasion; indeed I 
care little whether they were or were not. The 
incident was a minor one, collateral to the plot ; 
and Shakespeare, in his concern to get Hamlet 
decently back to Elsinore, may not have con- 
sidered its remoter implications. But still, 
even if we wholly reject Miles's theory, the 
simultaneous addition of all these passages 



34 The First Quarto 

throws light upon Shakespeare's conception. 
His last touches were designed to give the most 
favorable color to Hamlet's conduct, and to 
slur over his inaction. The audience were to 
understand, despite his temporary withdrawal 
from the scene, that he was attending strictly 
to business and that he would do something 
soon. To this subject also I shall return again. 

From all this investigation not very much 
has resulted. Some minor difficulties, including 
several which I have not mentioned, may be 
solved by examination of the First Quarto ; 
but the greater puzzles of the play, after the 
most diligent comparative study of the two ver- 
sions, remain as baffling as ever. Hamlet's 
character is essentially the same in 1603 that 
it is in 1604. He is younger, perhaps less pes- 
simistic, and certainly less of a philosopher, but 
he is the same man. Above all, his pretence of 
madness is as inexplicable in the First Quarto 
as in the Second. It can have no objective 
purpose, yet its immediate adoption precludes 
the subjective explanation. 

But our examination of the First Quarto has 



The First Quarto 35 

not been wasted labor. It has at least con- 
firmed our suspicion that the play lacks con- 
sistency; and the few minor discoveries already 
made encourage us to hope for better results 
if we pursue our line of inquiry a little farther. 



CHAPTER IV 
IkBfc anD JBelleforeet 

I have suggested two possible explanations 
of the inconsistencies in Hamlet, first, the fact 
that Shakespeare wrote parts of the play at 
different times, and second, the possibility that 
as he was only rewriting an old play he may 
have retained from his original some materials 
that failed to harmonize with his own concep- 
tion. The preceding chapter has proved the 
first explanation sound as far as it goes ; but 
it does not go far. In the remaining chapters 
I shall examine the sources of the play, and 
by comparing Shakespeare's tragedy with the 
work of his predecessors attempt to sift out 
those ideas which were peculiarly his own. 

An entry in the diary of the theatrical man- 
ager, Philip Henslowe, shows that he received 
eight shillings for a performance of Hamlet 
36 



Kyd and Belleforest 37 

on June 9th, 1594 ; and in a pamphlet published 
by Lodge in 1596, a certain character is com- 
pared to "the ghost which cried so miserally 
[sic] at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, 'Ham- 
let, revenge !" These allusions prove the quon- 
dam existence of a pre-Shakespearean Hamlet, 
though no such play is now extant ; and the 
following from Nash's prefatory epistle to 
Greene's Menaphon, printed in 1589, shows that 
the author of the play was Thomas Kyd. 



It is a common practice now-a-days, amongst a sort 
of shifting companions that run through every art and 
thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint whereto 
they were born and busy themselves with the endeavors 
of art, that could scarcely latinize their neck-verse if 
they should have need. Yet English Seneca read by 
candle-light yields many good sentences, as "Blood is 
a beggar," and so forth; and if you entreat him fair 
in a frosty morning he will afford you whole Hamlets, 
I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But O 
grief! Ternpus edax rerum, what's that will last al- 
ways? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance 
be dry; and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by 
page, at length must needs die to our stage: which 
makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in 
Aesop who, enamored with the Fox's new-fangles, for- 
sook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation; and 
these men, renouncing all possibilities of credit or esti- 
mation, to intermeddle with Italian translations. 



38 Kyd and Belleforest 

This passage, I say, shows that Kyd was the 
author of the pre-Shakespearean Hamlet. The 
cogency of the proof has been disputed, but I 
think unreasonably. "Noverint" was the first 
word of a common legal form, now usually 
rendered in English by "Know all men by these 
presents ;" and "the trade of Noverint" there- 
fore means the trade of the scrivener. Kyd's 
father was a scrivener, and Kyd might there- 
fore well be described as leaving that trade for 
the stage. Like most of his contemporaries, 
Kyd was much under the influence of Seneca. 
He was too good a Latin scholar to be depend- 
ent upon English translations ; but he had his 
academic education only from the Merchant 
Taylors' School, and the contemptuous insinu- 
ation of the university-bred Nash is therefore 
easily understood. Moreover (to quote Profes- 
sor Boas) "in 1588 Kyd appears to have 
given up, at least temporarily, his work for 
the stage, and to have leapt into the 'new occu- 
pation' of a translator from the Italian." Thus 
an extraordinary tissue of coincidences iden- 
tifies him with that imitator of Aesop's "Kid" 



Kyd and Belleforest 39 

who could write whole Hamlets of tragical 
speeches. There is slight further evidence of 
like purport, but I think the argument needs 
no bolstering. 

Kyd's Hamlet is now lost; but we have the 
French "novel" upon which it was based. This 
is one of the histoires tragiques of Francois de 
Belleforest, published in 1572 and translated 
into English some years later. Whether the 
original or the translation was used by Kyd 
is uncertain. The oldest extant copy of the 
English version is dated 1608, but it may have 
existed much earlier. Kyd, however, was well 
able to use the original French; and it seems 
most likely that the translation was suggested 
in part by the popularity of Kyd's play, or 
even Shakespeare's. 

Belleforest begins his story substantially as 
follows: (I substitute Shakespeare's proper 
names for the less familiar originals — Claudius 
for Fengon, Hamlet for Horvendille, etc.) 
The elder Hamlet and Claudius, two brothers, 
were joint governors of a province in Denmark. 
Hamlet married the King's daughter, Gertrude, 



4o Kyd and Belleforest 

and so kindled his brother's jealousy. Claudius 
assembled a band of men and fell upon Ham- 
let as he sat at a banquet, and slew him. He 
publicly avowed the deed, but asserted that he 
had done it in defence of Gertrude, whom Ham- 
let was on the point of slaying. Claudius then 
married Gertrude; and upon her father's death 
he became King of Denmark in her right. The 
younger Hamlet was a child when his father 
was murdered. As he grew older, he realized 
that Claudius must fear him, and would hardly 
let him come to man's estate if he seemed capa- 
ble of seeking vengeance. Accordingly he imi- 
tated the Roman Brutus, pretending to have 
lost his wits. 

Here, first, a minor matter is to be noted. 
The elder Hamlet was never King of Denmark, 
and Claudius reigned only by right of his wife. 
This answers simply enough a question which 
puzzles every reader of Shakespeare's play: 
how did Shakespeare's Claudius become king? 
Steevens was first to give the explanation now 
commonly accepted, that Denmark was an elect- 
ive monarchy and that Claudius was chosen 



Kyd and Belleforest 41 

by the electors because the younger Hamlet 
lacked influence and prestige. But clearly it 
was not so that the story originally shaped 
itself. In later parts of the novel it seems that 
Belleforest himself has forgotten the facts, for 
he speaks as if the elder Hamlet had been king 
and Claudius had made himself his heir by the 
murder. Naturally enough, therefore, Kyd and 
Shakespeare after him were themselves in the 
dark about the succession. One line in the play 
("popped in between the election and my 
hopes") does indeed suggest that Steevens's 
idea had occurred to Shakespeare, but there is 
nothing else to support it. Shakespeare never 
took the trouble to work the matter out. 

But a far more important feature of the 
novel is its plausible account of the pretence of 
madness. The murder, according to Bellefor- 
est, was open and notorious. This fact is 
partly obscured, to be sure, by a statement that 
Claudius effected it "in such sort that no man 
once so much as suspected him," but the con- 
text clears up the apparent inconsistency. 
These words mean merely that no man doubted 



42 Kyd and Belleforest 

his veracity when he cunningly pretended to 
have acted in Gertrude's defence. And later, 
it seems, the truth leaked out and the whole 
story was known. 

Even at first, then, everybody knew that 
Hamlet's father died by y the hand of Claudius. 
Hamlet himself knew it, and Claudius knew 
that he knew it. Hamlet was very young, for 
the murder is narrated in the same sentence with 
his father's marriage, and the marriage is ex- 
pressly stated to have been part, at least, of 
the murderer's provocation. Claudius knew 
that Hamlet would inevitably harbor revenge 
in his heart and become dangerous when he 
grew up; and Hamlet's device, therefore, is at 
least plausible enough for all purposes of fic- 
tion. The pretence of madness becomes trouble- 
some in Shakespeare's play, and demands ex- 
planation by some subtle analysis of Hamlet's 
character; but that is only because the murder 
has been made secret, and Claudius has no rea- 
son to dread Hamlet. 

I resume Belleforest's narrative. Among the 
friends of Claudius there was one who suspected 



Kyd and Belleforest 43 

Hamlet of counterfeiting, and obtained leave 
to spy upon him in his mother's chamber. Ham- 
let discovered him and stabbed him through 
the arras. Thereupon Claudius became uneasy, 
but he dared not openly kill Hamlet. Accord- 
ingly he sent him with two trusty ministers to 
England with a letter urging the English king 
to put him to death. But Hamlet, while at sea, 
purloined the letter and substituted another, 
urging the death of the two ministers and re- 
questing for Hamlet himself the hand of the 
king's daughter in marriage. The trick suc- 
ceeded and Hamlet made a long sojourn in 
England. 

Thereafter, returning to Denmark, Hamlet 
contrived to assemble the supporters of Clau- 
dius, to ply them with liquor, and by setting 
fire to their banqueting-hall to destroy them 
all. Hastening then to the apartment of 
Claudius, he found him undefended, and had 
no difficulty in despatching him. By a long 
public oration he won the allegiance of the 
Danish people, and his coronation was cele- 
brated with general rejoicing. 



44 Kyd and Belleforest 

This condensed digest suffices to show that 
Belief orest's novel meets all requirements of the 
theory framed by Werder in explanation of 
Shakespeare's play. In Belleforest Hamlet's 
difficulties are external, and they are many and 
grave. He wants more than brute revenge; 
he wants the crown, and to win it he must over- 
come not only Claudius but all his supporters. 
Claudius is strongly entrenched, and Hamlet 
stands practically alone against him. Hamlet 
has at the outset a difficult task even to save 
his own life, to say nothing of planning re- 
venge. His undertaking seems indeed im- 
possible, though he accomplishes it: for he 
accomplishes it by an equally impossible 
trick. The story of the holocaust is crude 
fiction. 

Moreover, there are in Belleforest no subjec- 
tive difficulties. Just here is the most striking 
difference between the novel and the play. 
Belleforest's Hamlet never procrastinated. He 
sojourned a year or more in England, while 
the Hamlet of the play only started on the voy- 
age thither; but while the Coleridgeans regard 



Kyd and Belleforcst 45 

the later hero's departure as a turning-away 
from his high purpose of revenge, his proto- 
type incurs no such reproach. Neither in his 
English life nor in his pretence of madness can 
we detect any suggestion of shrinking or 
deviation. 

There are in Belleforest's novel many fea- 
tures of minor interest which I need not detail. 
Thus there is an elaborate though not wholly 
consistent characterization of Gertrude, a 
vague suggestion of the story of Ophelia, and 
a curious hint of the comic aspect of insanity. 
I may note too, in passing, that the story has 
a happy ending; for though Belleforest contin- 
ues his narrative to Hamlet's death, the part 
in which we are interested does end happily. 
That part of the plot became tragic only 
when it was dramatized. For the present, 
however, we are concerned only with the 
main conception of Hamlet's character and 
conduct. 

We must remember that Shakespeare may not 
have known Belleforest's novel. I believe that 
he never saw it. In studying it, we are work- 



46 Kyd and Belleforest 

ing up towards Shakespeare's source from 
behind. Our ultimate purpose, however, is to 
learn something about the missing link between 
Belleforest and Shakespeare; and that missing 
link is the lost play of Thomas Kyd. 



CHAPTER V 

Gbe <3erman Ibamlet 

The German Hamlet is a play entitled 
Der Bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide Pun- 
ished). It was first printed at Berlin in 1781, 
from a manuscript which can be traced back 
only to 1710 ; but it is evidently a work of much 
earlier date. It presents in dramatic form the 
familiar story of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but 
with variations as striking as the resemblances. 
It is obviously related to the English play, but 
is the work of a very inferior craftsman. 

When the German play was first critically 
studied, it was thought to be a clumsy adapta- 
tion of the First Quarto. The curious fact 
that Polonius appears in the First Quarto under 
the name Corambis and in the German Hamlet 
as Corambus, suggested this conclusion at once. 
More recently another bit of evidence has been 
47 



48 The German Hamlet 

detected in the order of scenes in the several 
versions. In Shakespeare's completed play the 
arrival of the strolling players is announced in 
the jsecond act, and the "to be or not to be" 
soliloquy comes in Act III, followed by the 
"nunnery" scene. In the First Quarto the lat- 
ter passages come in Act II, before any men- 
tion of the players. In the German play the 
soliloquy is lacking; but the nunnery scene is 
clearly paralleled in Act II, Scene 4, while the 
players are announced two scenes later. These 
facts seem sufficient to establish provisionally 
that if the German play was derived from 
Shakespeare at all, it was derived from his first 
version — either from the First Quarto or di- 
rectly from some true copy of the play which 
that quarto misrepresented. 

More minute examination, however, suggested 
to several scholars (especially Dr. Latham) 
that the German play was adapted not from 
Shakespeare at all, but from that earlier play 
now ascribed to Kyd. Latham found two 
passages in Hamlet containing reminiscences 
of the classics, and in each case the German 



The German Hamlet 49 

play seemed to him closer to the Latin original 
than Shakespeare. This could not be, he 
argued, if the German author were copying 
Shakespeare; it seemed probable that both he 
and Shakespeare were copying a third drama- 
tist, without suspecting the reminiscent char- 
acter of the text, and that the German author 
was the more slavish in his reproduction. The 
argument is sound enough except in its prem- 
ises, but I confess I cannot feel sure that the 
German is closer to the Latin. Latham also 
detected an allusion in the German play which 
pointed to a pre-Shakespearean origin. The 
German Hamlet says, when Claudius is sending 
him to England: "Ay, ay, King; just send me 
off to Portugal so that I may never come back 
again." This, said Latham, is an allusion 
to the unfortunate expedition to Portugal in 
1589, in which eleven thousand soldiers per- 
ished. The inference is that the source-play 
must have been written shortly after that date ; 
and hence it must have been Kyd's, not Shake- 
speare's. 

Latham's conclusion is most welcome to every 



50 The German Hamlet 

student of the genesis of Hamlet, for if he was 
right the German play will surely teach us 
something about the lost tragedy of Kyd. 
But his argument has been elaborately answered 
(especially in Germany by Creizenach and 
Tanger) and his theory is no longer generally 
accepted. I must admit that the grounds of 
his conclusion are weak, and that it would take 
little to upset him ; but let us see what has been 
brought forward. 

The only formidable argument of Creizenach 
and Tanger is based upon four passages in the 
German Hamlet to which there are close paral- 
lels in the Second Quarto of Shakespeare, but 
none in the First. Two of the four will suffice 
for illustration. In the German play one of 
Ophelia's mad scenes ends as follows: "The 
King has invited me to supper and I must run 
fast. Look there ! my coach, my coach !" In 
Shakespeare's play she says, "Come, my coach ! 
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; 
good night, good night;" but in the First 
Quarto the passage is missing. Again, the 
unimportant character called Francisco in 



The German Hamlet 51 

Shakespeare's final version appears in the First 
Quarto without a name; he is simply "First 
Sentinel ;" but in the German play he reappears 
as Francisco. 

/ What is to be argued from these facts? 
Everybody recognizes that the German play 
cannot be merely an adaptation of Shake- 
speare's final version ; such a supposition is re- 
futed by the name Corambus. Now Creizenach 
and Tanger contend that it cannot be derived 
solely either from the First Quarto or from any 
earlier version of the play, such as Kyd's ; and 
they say this is proved by the name Francisco 
(and the three other coincidences referred to 

___above). Accordingly Creizenach conjectures a 
lost Quarto of Shakespeare's play, intermediate 
between the First and the Second; while Tan- 
ger, more careful and elaborate in his argument, 
derives the German play from the First Quarto, 
and believes that the four coincidences are due 
to stage interpolations made at a late date by 
persons acquainted with Shakespeare's com- 
pleted play. This is the explanation now ac- 
cepted by most scholars who have weighed the 



52 The German Hamlet 

evidence, including most notably Professor 
Boas. 

I agree that the four coincidences cannot be 
due to chance ; but I feel little disturbed by the 
conclusion based upon them, for an all-impor- 
tant consideration has been overlooked. The 
First Quarto is only a very imperfect repro- 
duction of Shakespeare's first version. It is 
disfigured by mistakes and omissions. It is evi- 
dent that the short-hand reporters were unable 
to keep up with the actors. When their notes 
were unintelligible, the printers sometimes re- 
produced them as they stood and sometimes 
made liberal cuts. I will adduce a single in- 
stance, the first that I find at a random opening 
of the book. In the completed play the Ghost 
says to Hamlet: 

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; 

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be 

A couch for luxury and damned incest. 

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act, 

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 

Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven. 

In the First Quarto this passage is abridged as 
follows : 



The German Hamlet 53 



If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; 
But howsoever, let not thy heart 
Conspire against thy mother aught; 
Leave her to heaven. 



Is it not clear that Shakespeare's original 
manuscript contained the whole clause italicized 
above, or at least its equivalent? The abridged 
version is imperfect in both sense and metre, 
and cannot be as Shakespeare wrote it. Yet 
if the German Hamlet happened to reproduce 
the words "howsoever thou pursuest this act," 
Creizenach would have cited them along with 
the other coincidences ; he would say that the 
play could not be derived from Kyd because 
these words were not written till after the time 
of the First Quarto ! 

If the play is derived from Kyd we must 
expect to find in it a number of passages of 
just this sort — passages which were in Kyd 
and which were copied by Shakespeare in both 
his first and his second version, but which, by 
error, were omitted from the piratical First 
Quarto. Four is not an unreasonable number, 
in view of the printer's gross bungling. To 



54 The German Hamlet 

my mind, indeed, the presence in the German 
play of unique features from both quartos, — 
Corambus from the First and Francisco from 
the Second, — affords, under the circumstances, 
a very strong argument for the derivation 
from Kyd. That derivation explains the co- 
incidences easily and naturally, while the 
explanations of Creizenach and Tanger, given 
above, are complex and round-about, and are 
over-weighted with matter of very doubtful 
conjecture. 

On the whole, therefore, I feel that Latham's 
theory of the origin of the German Hamlet has 
not yet been successfully assailed. The bril- 
liant analyses of Creizenach and Tanger have 
actually fortified his theory, and if there were 
nothing further to be said I should regard it 
as provisionally established by a decided weight 
of evidence. But there are other arguments 
which have not yet been advanced, which will 
establish Latham's theory beyond question. 

One argument — a minor one, perhaps — may 
be based on the manner of Hamlet's return from 
the English voyage. In the German play, a 



The German Hamlet 55 

separate scene is devoted to Hamlet's escape. 
He appears in a remote spot with two bandits, 
who tell him that by the King's orders they 
are about to kill him. Hamlet, after some 
parley, appears to resign himself to the inevi- 
table, but begs leave to say one prayer. "After 
that," he assures them, "I am ready to die. 
But I will give you a signal; I will turn my 
hands toward heaven, and the moment I stretch 
out my arms, fire ! Aim both pistols at my 
sides, and when I say 'shoot !' give me as much 
as I need; and be sure to hit me so that I shall 
not be long in torture." 

The bandits accordingly stand beside Ham- 
let with pistols aimed until he gives the signal; 
but then he throws himself forward on his face 
and they shoot each other ! Hamlet searches 
their bodies and finds a letter, whereupon he 
soliloquizes as follows : "This letter is written 
to an arch-murderer in England; should this 
attempt fail, they had only to hand me over to 
him, and he would soon enough blow out the 
light of my life. But the gods stand by the 
righteous. Now will I return to my father, to 



56 The German Hamlet 

his horror. But I will not trust any longer 
to water ; who knows but what the ship's captain 
is a villain too? I will go to the first town and 
take the post." 

Now in the First Quarto we are told merely 
that Hamlet's ship was "crossed by the conten- 
tion of the winds,"* and that he was "set 
ashore," while the ship, with Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern in it, went on to England. This 
was a feeble and unsatisfactory evasion, and 
Shakespeare found it necessary, in his second 
version, to introduce the pirate ship and let it 
capture Hamlet. I can explain the weak 
handling of this business in the First Quarto 
only by supposing that Kyd had devised an in- 
cident which Shakespeare preferred to sup- 
press. Now the German author does not gen- 
erally expand much upon his original; he 
abridges almost everything, and his whole play 
is only half as long as the First Quarto; but 
if his original was any version of Shakespeare's 

*In the German play (V. 2), when Hamlet tells Hora- 
tio of his adventure with the bandits, he says they 
had all gone ashore while the ship lay at anchor 
because of contrary winds. 



The German Hamlet $y 

play, the bandit scene was an elaborate and 
gratuitous expansion. This is hard to be- 
lieve. 

If, on the other hand, we accept Latham's 
theory, the facts are easily explained. I be- 
lieve that in Kyd's lost play there must have 
been something substantially like the scene with 
the bandits. The German author, adapting 
Kyd's play, has somewhat mangled the inci- 
dent, for he has omitted altogether the fate of 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, apparently con- 
fusing them with their ruffian hirelings ; but 
he has retained the essentials. The scene seems 
to us very crude and ridiculous, but it is by no 
means beneath the Elizabethan taste for melo- 
drama. It is, I think, just such an incident 
as Kyd might have devised; and of course it 
is such an incident as Shakespeare would have 
rejected. He did, I believe, reject it ; but found 
no time, in the haste of his first revision, to elab- 
orate a decent substitute. 

I have thought that in some other details of 
the German play, as in this scene with the ban- 
dits, there lurked evidence in support of 



58 The German Hamlet 

Latham; but we will delay no longer over de- 
tails. His hypothesis is made solid fact by 
consideration of the general drift of the play. 
It is to this, rather than to correspondences of 
detail, that I wish chiefly to direct attention. 
In the total conception of the story, and es- 
pecially in respect to those matters already 
noted as of crucial significance, the German 
play is much closer to the spirit of Belleforest's 
novel than to that of Shakespeare's play; and 
here, I think, we have conclusive evidence that 
it was derived from Belleforest directly 
through Kyd, and not (more indirectly) 
through both Kyd and Shakespeare. 

le most striking single characteristic of 
''Shakespeare's Hamlet, as most students under- 
stand him, is procrastination. Whether we get 
the impression from the dramatic action or 
from Hamlet's soliloquies, whether we regard it 
as culpable or as blameless and inevitable, the 
idea of procrastination is unmistakably present 
iij the play. But in the German Hamlet the hero 
never procrastinates. There is delay, but only 
delay for which he is not responsible. He is 



The German Hamlet 59 

never an instant in doubt;* from beginning 
to end he is only waiting for a chance. He 
is restless under the necessity of delay; but he 
never reproaches himself, as does Shakespeare's 
hero; he merely bewails the necessity. For il- 
lustration, we may compare two characteristic 
utterances. Shakespeare's Hamlet says: 



Now whether it be 
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event, — 
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom 
And ever three parts coward, — I do not know 
Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do," 
Silh I have cause, and will, and strength, and means, 
To do't. 



As against this, the German Hamlet says : 

Unfortunate Prince! how much longer must thou live 
without peace? How long dost thou delay, O righteous 
Nemesis, before thou whettest thy righteous sword of 
vengeance for my uncle, the fratricide? Hither have I 
come once more, but cannot attain to my revenge, 
because the fratricide is surrounded all the time by so 
many people. 

*Except where he catches the King at prayer; and 
there his reason for deferring his revenge is obviously 
a real one, not a pretext. 



60 The German Hamlet 

The reason for the delay, as explained by 
the words italicized, is that Hamlet cannot get 
at the King. This difficulty is in the German 
author's mind throughout; it is the fundamen- 
tal idea of the play. It is emphasized almost 
at the very beginning, when Hamlet tells his 
plan to Horatio. 



My worthy friend Horatio, through this assumed mad- 
ness I hope to get the opportunity of revenging my 
father's death. You know, however, that my father 
is always surrounded by many guards; wherefore it may 
miscarry. Should you chance to find my dead body, 
let it be honorably buried; for at the first opportunity 
I will try my chance with him. 



Horatio's reply is a fruitless attempt to dis- 
suade Hamlet from his revenge ! 

In Shakespeare's play, on the other hand, 
there is nowhere the least explicit suggestion 
of this difficulty. In almost ludicrous oppo- 
sition to the conditions shown in the German 
play, we find in Shakespeare only a single men- 
tion of the King's guards ; and that is when 
the King asks where they are! "Where are 
my Switzers?" he cries, when Laertes, unop- 



The German Hamlet 61 

posed, is breaking down the door and rushing 
in upon him. 

In the German play, too, the reason for the 
pretence of madness is clear enough. Hamlet 
tells Horatio the Ghost's story as soon as the 
Ghost has left him, and at once declares his 
purpose to feign madness. "From this moment 
I will begin a feigned madness; and, thus 
feigning, so cunningly will I play my part 
that I shall find an opportunity to avenge my 
father's death." And again, a little later: 
"I will now go and, feigning madness, wait upon 
him until I find an opportunity to effect my 
revenge." The reason, I say, is clear enough. 
It may not be a very good reason ; I think it is 
not; but there is no mystery about it, and no 
possibility of mistaking it. 

In all these particulars the German writer 
is reproducing, as if from Belleforest, ideas of 
which Shakespeare affords no hint. In Belle- 
forest, Hamlet has a difficult task, and the diffi- 
culty is wholly external. Claudius has strong 
supporters about him, whom Hamlet must ac- 
tually bum up before he can kill the King. 



62 The German Hamlet 

Hamlet never procrastinates and never doubts 
his duty or his own purpose, but is vigilant for 
his first opportunity. And in Belleforest, 
finally, the feigned madness has a purpose 
clearly defined and announced. 

These considerations seem to me conclusive. 
A blundering playwright like the German could 
hardly have cleared up Hamlet's motives and 
brought them so squarely into focus, if he had 
had only Shakespeare's vague hints to start 
with. No playwright, however stupid, could 
have failed to catch from Shakespeare some 
suggestion of the hero's doubts and perplexi- 
ties ; and this playwright was certainly not 
clever enough to eliminate all those things on 
purpose, and to substitute, with thoroughgoing 
consistency, the idea of external difficulty. 
And finally, if we can suppose that the most 
vital elements of Shakespeare's play were de- 
liberately ignored by the German, can we also 
suppose that by blind chance he substituted for 
them those very elements which had been in 
Belleforest's novel, and which the English 
dramatist had thought fit to reject? Such 



The German Hamlet 63 

a coincidence as this is so incredible that I ven- 
ture to call it impossible; and I therefore con- 
clude, with an assurance that will last until I am 
very rudely shaken, that the German Hamlet is 
an adaptation from Kyd. 



CHAPTER VI 
IKbo's Ibamlet 

Our next aim must be to determine, so far as 
is possible and important, the nature of Kyd's 
lost play, in the hope of thus solving the mys- 
tery of Shakespeare's revision. There are two 
ways of approaching this problem. First, by 
study of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, a play strik- 
ingly like Hamlet in its groundwork of plot 
and situation, we may familiarize ourselves with 
Kyd's mental calibre and his habits in construc- 
tion and characterization. Second, by com- 
parison of Shakespeare's Hamlet with the Ger- 
man play, and of both with Belleforest's novel, 
we may hit with certainty upon many elements 
which must have been present in Kyd's play. 
The former method is the less satisfactory, for 
it necessarily leaves much to the vagueness of 
conjecture. We will consider it first, and 
briefly. 

The chief character in The Spanish Trag- 
64 



Kyd's Hamlet 65 

edy, Hieronimo, undertakes to avenge the mur- 
der of his son. He has found his dead body, 
and is at first ignorant who killed him. A 
mysterious letter from the mistress of the vic- 
tim names the murderers ; they are two young 
men of the highest station, a nephew of the 
King of Spain and a son of the Viceroy of 
Portugal. Hieronimo devotes his life to re- 
venge, but is conscious of the extreme difficulty 
of his task. He recognizes also, despite his 
moral certainty that the letter is genuine, that 
he must seek corroborative evidence before he 
acts. In the latter part of the third act the 
murderers overreach themselves, and unwit- 
tingly afford Hieronimo the confirmation he 
needs. He makes futile efforts to win a hear- 
ing before the King, and his mind temporarily 
gives way under the strain ; but eventually he 
contrives to engage both the guilty princes in 
an amateur performance of a tragedy, with 
himself and the bereaved mistress ; and he and 
the lady bring the performance to a startling 
climax by stabbing first their royal fellow- 
actors and then themselves. 



66 Kyd's Hamlet 

The significant feature, for us, of Kyd's 
handling of this material, is the singleness of 
purpose with which Hieronimo addresses him- 
self to his task. He is wholly possessed with 
the spirit of revenge. At first he does not 
know who his enemies are, but he is determined 
to punish them if he can discover them. When 
they are denounced to him, he still must obtain 
conclusive proof; but, given that proof, he has 
no atom of doubt about his duty. 

Professor Boas says : "The cardinal weak- 
ness in the play, which prevents it ranking 
among dramatic masterpieces, is Kyd's fail- 
ure in an adequate psychological analysis of 
[Hieronimo's] motives for this delay. Inaction 
only becomes dramatic material when, as in 
the case of the Shakespearean Hamlet, it is 
shown to be rooted in some disease of character 
or will. But Hieronimo's procrastination is 
due at first merely to ignorance of who the 
murderers are, and afterwards to a suspicion 
of [the lady's] designs. It is not till toward 
the close of the third act that there is the 
suggestion, in [Hieronimo's] self-reproaches, 



Kyd's Hamlet 67 

of infirmity of purpose as a contributory 
cause." 

Apart from its marked Coleridgean bias, this 
criticism is mainly just; but I am disposed to 
quarrel with the last sentence. I doubt if Kyd 
means anywhere to suggest infirmity of pur- 
pose as the cause of delay. Hieronimo's mind, 
it seems to me, is unhinged by the very strength 
of his purpose and the seeming hopelessness of 
accomplishing it ; but the obstacles are purely 
external. There are passages in which he med- 
itates suicide ; but this is not from disgust with 
his task, it is from despair of achieving it. 
In other passages he masks his purpose, feign- 
ing love for his enemies ; but this is mere craft 
and cunning. The purpose itself looms large 
in his mind from the beginning, and the single 
passion of revenge usurps complete dominion 
over his soul. 

This is a striking fact; and it is the one 
fact which I wish to emphasize in this brief 
survey of The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd's pur- 
pose was less to depict human nature than to 
depict a certain tragic passion. His Hieronimo 



68 Kyd's Hamlet 

acts not as a real man under such circum- 
stances, but rather as an imaginary incarnation 
of revenge. Professor Boas says, "there is 
no adequate psychological analysis of Hieron- 
imo's motives for delay." I think the motives 
for his delay were clear enough, and needed no 
psychological analysis ; the motives that Pro- 
fessor Boas thinks imperfectly analyzed were 
not in Kyd's mind at all; but it is true that 
there is no adequate psychological analysis of 
Hieronimo's vindictiveness. The spirit of re- 
venge is assumed by Kyd as a postulate, and 
his dramatic art is exercised merely to exhibit 
this spirit in untrammeled and supernatural 
activity. 

This, however, is a line of argument in which 
we cannot get away from the personal equa- 
tion ; and I am unwilling to depend upon any 
reasoning in which I am opposed to the highest 
scholarship. There is, as I have already indi- 
cated, a better method of getting at Kyd's 
Hamlet, namely by ^comparison of its parent 
stock ( Belief orest) with its two derivatives 
(the German play and Shakespeare's). It is 



Kyd's Hamlet 69 

evident that any element common to two of 
these three versions of the story must in all 
probability have been present in Kyd's play. 
That is to say, whatever we find in both Belle- 
forest and the German adapter, or in both 
Belleforest and Shakespeare, must have been in 
Kyd; for how else could the later dramatist 
have stumbled upon it? And whatever we find 
common to the German dramatist and Shake- 
speare must also have been in Kyd, unless we 
are willing to accord large privileges to chance 
coincidence. By sorting out, therefore, all the 
ideas that occur in any of the three authors, 
and bringing together again all that are found 
♦ in any two, it should, in theory, be possible to 
effect a skeleton reconstruction of Kyd's play. 
This we are now in position to do, so far as our 
purpose demands. 

The action of Kyd's play begins with a 
night scene at Elsinore. There are sentinels 
on the watch. Their talk discloses that in 
former watches they have seen a ghost. Hora- 
tio joins them. The Ghost appears and is rec- 
ognized as resembling the late king. Hamlet 



jo Kyd's Hamlet 

is told, and joins the others. During the watch, 
sounds of revelry are repeatedly heard within, 
and there is comment on the new King's merry- 
making; but Hamlet is sick at heart over his 
father's death, his mother's hasty marriage, 
and his own exclusion from the succession. 
The Ghost reappears, beckoning to Hamlet, 
who follows him. The Ghost says he has but a 
short time to stay; he must return to purga- 
tory; his brother killed him, pouring hebenon 
in his ear while he slept in his garden ; and 
he demands revenge. Hamlet swears to avenge 
him, the Ghost disappears, and Hamlet rejoins 
his friends. Before telling them anything he 
demands an oath which they take upon his 
sword, the Ghost mysteriously echoing his words 
from without. Hamlet, inferring the Ghost's 
displeasure, decides not to tell at once of 
his experience, and waits till he is alone 
with Horatio. To him only he tells the whole 
story, announces that he undertakes the diffi- 
cult and perilous task of slaying the murderer, 
and that as a means to his end he will feign 
madness. 



Kyd's Hamlet 71 

In this summary of the opening scenes of 
Kyd's play, the first fact to be noted is that 
Kyd invented the Ghost.* In Belleforest the 
murder was open and notorious, though Clau- 
dius cunningly feigned a justification. Kyd 
made the murder secret and allowed it to be 
revealed only to Hamlet by his father's spirit. 
This was a brilliant dramatic device, serving 
both to emphasize the isolation of the hero and 
to impart to the whole story of revenge that 
supernatural grewsomeness of which Kyd was 
enamored, and of which he made effective use 
in The Spanish Tragedy. But the device, with 
all its cleverness, entailed serious embarrass- 
ments. 

Kyd kept Hamlet's pretence of madness, 
somewhat as he found it in Belleforest. Now 
after Kyd had made his one great change in 
the story, the pretence of madness ceased to be 
very reasonable. The German hero avows that 
he made the pretence because it would help him 
to an opportunity for vengeance; and this 

*This, by the way, is independently shown by Lodge's 
allusion, page 37, ante. 



J2 Kyd's Hamlet 

motive, adopted without change from Belle- 
forest, was doubtless the only one allowed Ham- 
let by Kyd. It had become a very poor one, 
however; and indeed no sufficient motive could 
have been alleged, for the device, from a prac- 
tical point of view, was now worse than useless. 
Perhaps Kyd did not observe that the pre- 
tence of madness became valueless when the 
murder was made secret, though I think it 
equally likely that he saw the difficulty and 
ignored it. The pretence was dramatically 
effective; it must, indeed, have won a great 
part of the success of the play ; and to Kyd's 
way of thinking success was ample justification. 
Retaining, then, the pretence of madness, 
Kyd retained also the assumption that this pre- 
tence was a practical step towards the hero's 
end, although in fact the bottom had dropped 
out from this assumption. It was natural and 
proper, therefore, to let Hamlet resolve upon 
his pretence at once, as soon as he had heard 
the Ghost's story. This was the course sug- 
gested by Belleforest, who makes the pretence 
of madness the starting-point for the story of 



Kyd's Hamlet 73 

the boy-prince; and when the difficulties of the 
task were wholly external, and the pretence was 
assumed to be a helpful measure, there was no 
reason why it should not be adopted at the 
outset. The instantaneous determination to 
feign becomes unintelligible, we must remember, 
only when the difficulties of the task are seen 
to be internal and when the pretence is no longer 
regarded as having a practical value. 

I will outline the rest of Kyd's play only 
in part. The brief account given of the Ger- 
man Hamlet in the last chapter tells nearly all 
that we need know. Kyd's hero is never in 
doubt as to his duty, though at first he wants 
confirmation of the Ghost's accusation. He 
takes advantage of the visit of the players to 
surprise the King with a representation of his 
crime in dumb-show. He kills Polonius (Co- 
rambis) by mistake, while the latter is eaves- 
dropping. The Ghost visits him a second time, 
apparently not because dissatisfied with Ham- 
let's procedure, but merely to make a good stage 
effect. Hamlet declines to kill the King at his 
first opportunity, because he is then at prayer. 



74 Kyd's Hamlet 

Hamlet is sent on a voyage for England; but 
he returns and achieves his revenge at last, 
though at the price of his own life, in the dis- 
order attending the combat with Laertes. 

I have said that the feigned madness was a 
practical step. It is clear, however, that Kyd 
gave it dramatic coloring by letting it express 
Hamlet's agonized distraction. The German 
play has little tragic atmosphere of any sort, 
but there is enough resemblance here to Shake- 
speare's tragedy to suggest that in Kyd the 
madness was not a purely intellectual effort; 
the scenes of feigning were highly emotional. 
Yet we also know from The Spanish Tragedy 
that they can have demanded no subtlety of 
psychological insight in their creator. Kyd's 
Hamlet, like Hieronimo, suffered from the in- 
tensity of his passion for revenge, not from its 
impotency. Though his sufferings were per- 
haps most in evidence when he was feigning 
madness, for then indeed he partly discarded his 
mask, yet it is certain that the pretence was 
not consciously adopted as a safety-valve for 
his emotions, and it is almost equally certain 



Kyd's Hamlet J$ 

that Hamlet was in no need of a safety-valve. 
He was an ideal romantic hero, master of him- 
self and intent upon his purpose. He may 
have reproached himself for the delay, as 
Hieronimo did, though this does not appear 
in the German play; but, if so, it must have 
been very clear (as in The Spanish Tragedy) 
that his apparent self-reproach was only the 
effect of his impatient despair at the restraint 
imposed from without. There was nothing for 
which he could seriously blame himself, and, 
above all, Kyd did not intend that he should 
be blamed by anybody else. 

If now we consider how far the theories of 
Coleridge and Werder might have been applied 
to Kyd's play, we shall find neither of them 
wholly applicable. Coleridge's theory, indeed, 
does not apply at all; for though Hamlet will 
not act without further assurance, and though 
he suffers profound distress at his inability 
to act more promptly, yet he does all that the 
most uncompromising apostle of revenge could 
reasonably require. 

Werder's theory, on the other hand, is ap- 



j6 Kyd's Hamlet 

plicable to this extent: Hamlet is restrained 
by external difficulties, and acts throughout 
with the single purpose of overcoming those 
difficulties. But his ultimate purpose is by no 
means to secure such complete justice as Wer- 
der dreams of. He is animated by the brutish 
passion for revenge. He wants blood for 
blood, that his father's spirit may be appeased 
and his own thirst quenched. He will save him- 
self harmless if he can, to be sure, for he has 
the human instinct of self-preservation; but 
self-preservation is a side-issue. He contem- 
plates the possibility that he may lose his life 
in his attempt, and he is willing to lose it if 
need be; he will kill Claudius as soon as he 
can, whatever the result, for to kill Claudius 
is his one overmastering desire. 



CHAPTER VII 

Sbafceepeace's Ibamlet 

Shakespeare was not a ready inventor of 
incident. He took full advantage of the Eliz- 
abethan license of borrowing, and adopted 
ready-made plots wherever he found them. He 
made alterations, of course; but they were 
usually slight. In the story of Silvia, and 
again in the story of Hermione, he twisted 
tragedy into comedy, while in King Lear he 
turned a happy ending into wholesale tragedy ; 
but in general his changes were less revolution- 
ary. The making of plot-material was not his 
business. 

What he did feel to be his business was the 
realization of character. His original provided 
him with a good story, but the characters 
were often no more than puppets. Stirring 
deeds were done, but as to what manner of men 
did them the older writers were apt to be non- 
77 



j8 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

committal. Giraldi's Iago and Holinshed's 
Macbeth are men of straw. Shakespeare's task 
was to retell Giraldi's story and Holinshed's 
history, and in the retelling to make Macbeth 
and Iago live. Perhaps he consciously put the 
question to himself, "What kind of men must 
these have been, to do as they did?" At any 
rate, it is by imagining him to put such a ques- 
tion that we can most easily revive in our own 
minds his processes of creation. By these proc- 
esses he made new and original characters ; but 
the materials of which he made them were his 
borrowed plots. 

In Hamlet, therefore, it does not surprise us 
to discover that almost all the plot was old. 
Shakespeare would be especially sparing of in- 
vention when he was not newly dramatizing 
fiction or history, but only remodeling material 
already dramatized. In such cases he always 
retained the main outlines of his original, some- 
times even minute details of the scenario. He 
was content to put new wine in the old bottles. 

Of course Shakespeare reproduced those in- 
consistencies which Kyd had already imported 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 79 

into the Hamlet story. By making the murder 
secret, Kyd had made the pretence of madness 
absurd ; yet he had retained it, and Shakespeare 
retained it too. Kyd's Hamlet had had a very 
difficult task to accomplish, and had foreseen 
that it would take a long time ; and Shakespeare 
followed Kyd step by step through the scenes 
in which this foresight was shown. His Ham- 
let, like Kyd's, resolves at once upon the pre- 
tence of madness, and prepares for an indefinite 
period of suspense by swearing everybody to 
secrecy. 

Here, however, Shakespeare is not content 
with merely taking over the existing difficulties 
of his plot; he actually creates new difficulties. 
Kyd, it will be remembered, had narrowed the 
scope of Hamlet's task, limiting it to mere sav- 
age vengeance ; but he had retained from 
Belleforest the notion that Claudius was hard 
to get at. Hence it was proper for Hamlet 
to foresee long delay and at once plan to face 
it. But Shakespeare, though he keeps the 
passage in which the difficulty of the task is 
foreseen, eliminates the difficulty itself. In 



80 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

Shakespeare's play Claudius is not hard to get 
at. There is no evidence that Hamlet could 
not have run upon him and given him his death 
at any time, had he so chosen. 

Shakespeare's reasons for retaining those 
passages which his own exposition thus made 
absurd were doubtless very simple. The pas- 
sages were good in themselves, and they were 
already in the play. I believe that he could not 
have written any such passages if the whole 
play had been a new invention of his own. 
In that case the details of his creation, com- 
ing to life in his imagination simultaneously, 
must have been consistent with one another. 
But the nature of Shakespeare's genius was 
creative, not critical. The unity and consist- 
ency which in a wholly original creation would 
come unsought, could hardly come in a revision 
of Kyd's curious play unless by processes of 
rigid critical analysis. For such processes 
Shakespeare had neither time nor inclination. 
To the reader who has found it tedious to fol- 
low my reasonings, this will seem indeed no 
wonder. 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 81 

It is easy, therefore, to understand why 
Shakespeare retained the embarrassments cre- 
ated by Kyd; but why did he create new ones 
by eliminating the difficulty of Hamlet's task? 
Why is it only in the German Hamlet that we 
hear of the King's body-guard, of Hamlet's 
vigilant watch for an opportunity to kill, and 
of the possibility that his dead body may be 
found somewhere by Horatio? 

The obvious answer is that Shakespeare sup- 
pressed all this evidence of the difficulty of the 
task chiefly because that difficulty did not in- 
terest him. He cared little for adventure. He 
indulged his audiences with it in Pericles and 
Cymbeline, but in general his plays are free 
from it. He saw men's acts not as exertions 
made upon external objects but as results of 
internal struggles ; he was interested in effects 
of character and will, not of muscle and agility. 

Accordingly Shakespeare instinctively slight- 
ed things that to Kyd were essentials. In Kyd, 
as in Belleforest, Hamlet could not kill Clau- 
dius, while to Shakespeare the only question of 
any interest was whether Hamlet would. The 



82 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

evidence that he could not, therefore, has been 
quietly dropped out as immaterial and irrele- 
vant. Yet Shakespeare has confused his own 
design by retaining passages appropriate only 
to the design of his predecessors ; he allows his 
Hamlet to act on occasion as if he could not, 
although it seems clear all the time that he 
could if he would. 

But though the plot was thus made still more 
incomprehensible by Shakespeare's waning in- 
terest in melodrama, it had been bad enough 
as he first found it in Kyd. As was his wont, 
he addressed himself to the creation of the 
necessary characters, and the first question 
that suggested itself may well have been this: 
"What kind of man must this Hamlet have 
been, the impossible hero of this impossible 
plot? What kind of man, with such a task 
thrust upon him, would go off on so imprac- 
ticable a side-track? What is the meaning of 
this absurd pretence of madness? How can I 
possibly make it go?" 

In some such way as this, I think, the pre- 
tence of madness was the starting-point from 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 83 

which Hamlet's character was evolved, and it 
may well have determined the whole course of 
its development. The sensitive, passionate 
nature of the Hamlet whom we know, the hys- 
terical intensity of his agony when his cherished 
ideals are shattered, even his histrionic fancy 
for playing with his own instinctive loath- 
ings — all these traits seem to have sprung up 
in Shakespeare's imagination as he worked 
backwards from the feigned madness. He 
could account for that strange device only as 
a safety-valve for the ebullitions of Hamlet's 
own passion. He could see no exterior motive 
for it at all; and as the motives assigned by 
Kyd were uninteresting as well as insufficient, 
he suppressed all reference to them. I do not 
believe, however, that this suppression was con- 
scious and deliberate. 

The idea of the safety-valve was, I think, 
wholly original with Shakespeare; but even if 
we suppose some germ to have been latent in 
Kyd's play, we must recognize in Shakespeare's 
development of it a brilliant feat of genius. 
Yet in working it out he has had to bring 



84 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

Hamlet so near the verge of chronic hysteria 
that some critics have denied his sanity, while 
most have thought him an incapable weakling: 
and even by going to this extreme Shakespeare 
has not achieved the impossible task of making 
the plot plausible. 

Some critics, I say, have pronounced Ham- 
let insane. Such, especially, has been the diag- 
nosis of certain expert alienists. Now if the 
incidents of the play were facts instead of fic- 
tion, I am sure we should have to accept this 
judgment, and anyone in real life who talked 
and acted exactly as Hamlet does would be 
locked up; but the incidents are not facts. 
The futility of his conduct and the wildness 
of his language do not suffice to condemn the 
hero of the drama ; for he cannot be mad unless 
Shakespeare intended him to be, and his conduct 
is no proof of Shakespeare's intent. Nearly 
everything that Hamlet did was a legacy to 
Shakespeare from Belleforest and Kyd. They 
did not mean to cast doubt upon Hamlet's 
sanity, and no doubt is cast upon it by Shake- 
speare's acceptance of their inventions. If we 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 85 

want competent evidence of Hamlet's insanity, 
we must seek it in Shakespeare's own contribu- 
tions to the play; they are Shakespeare's com- 
ments, so to speak, on his borrowed plot, and 
they alone can be trusted to declare his mind. 
Of course they emphatically proclaim Hamlet 
sane. 

But most critics have stopped short of 
insanity and have charged Hamlet only 
with weakness and incapacity. From Goethe, 
Schlegel, and Coleridge, to Boas, Bradley, and 
Raleigh, all but a few have taken the view dis- 
cussed in my first chapter. I have shown that 
their interpretation cannot avail for the play 
as a whole, for, even if Shakespeare meant what 
they suppose, he has certainly left in the play 
much that is inconsistent with that meaning. 
But was that meaning his? 

Here again Ave must remind ourselves that 
the play is not fact, but imperfectly digested 
fiction. If it were fa'ct, we might argue from 
Hamlet's dilatory pretence of madness, from 
his willing departure for England, indeed from 
all his conduct that is known to us, that he was 



86 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

just such a palterer as the Coleridgeans think 
him. But as it is, we know that we have no 
right to reason so. We may not call the pre- 
tence of madness dilatory. It was clever and 
practical strategy in the original; and Kyd 
and Shakespeare, by obscuring its practical 
value, have not necessarily converted it into 
imbecility. The journey to England was not . 
a willing abandonment of Hamlet's design. In 
the original it was a plan imposed upon him 
by irresistible authority, and no other course 
was open to him under the circumstances. 
Shakespeare has projected some of these cir- 
cumstances into the fourth dimension, but by 
what right may we treat them as non-existent? 
It would be very strange if Shakespeare 
adopted for his Hamlet the whole Coleridgean 
conception. He was merely repolishing a play 
with a typical romantic hero, a man ready and 
quick in action and whole-souled in devotion to 
his task. There is no hint that his conduct 
deserves anything but praise. Both Kyd and 
Belleforest clearly meant to represent Hamlet 
as doing just what they imagined he ought to 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 87 

do ; or at any rate he did more than this, rather 
than less. Now Shakespeare read character 
more profoundly than his predecessors, and 
sometimes took new views of his heroes' diffi- 
culties and duties; but I recall no instance of 
his turning a model of virtue into a dreadful 
example of vice. When he follows an old plot 
as closely as he does in Hamlet, retaining the 
whole story practically intact, together with 
most of the stage business, is it conceivable that 
he would transfigure its entire meaning? It 
would be as if in Othello he had made Desde- 
mona really guilty, and Iago an honest coun- 
selor ! 

Such radical changes did not occur to 
Shakespeare. He was economical of inven- 
tion — to borrow the happy phrase of Professor 
Wendell — and between his sources and his own 
creation we look for easier transitions. He cut 
his characters not to suit a vagrant fancy, 
but for the plots in which they belonged. He 
made Proteus an aesthetic sentimentalist be- 
cause no other kind of character would do what 
Proteus did. He added refinements of egotism 



88 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

and selfishness to the Coriolanus of Plutarch, 
for in no other way could Shakespeare account 
for his disloyalty. He made Bertram a cad, 
for how else could the plot be rationalized? 

So it must have been with Hamlet. If in 
Kyd's play there had seemed to be no external 
difficulties, and if Kyd's hero had been guilty 
of inexplicable procrastination, Shakespeare 
might naturally have made him a man of weak 
will, even if no such trait were clearly marked 
in the original; and he might then have evolved 
in his own mind all that interesting Coleridgean 
notion of the active powers stifled by the con- 
templative. But in Kyd's play Hamlet was not 
guilty of procrastination, and the external dif- 
ficulties were plainly in evidence throughout. 
Even if we grant that the Coleridgean concep- 
tion is a possible one, and within range of 
Shakespeare's understanding of human nature, 
there was nothing in Kyd to stimulate Shake- 
speare's invention to such activity. Antecedent 
probability is therefore against the theory of 
Coleridge. 

Antecedent probability is a precarious guide 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 89 

when we are studying the operations of genius, 
but provisionally I think we shall do well to 
follow it one step farther. Seeing that Shake- 
speare was not likely, a priori, to do as Cole- 
ridge thinks he did, let us ask ourselves what 
he was likely to do with such a plot and such 
a character as he found in Kyd. I think we 
shall find an answer that will fit the facts. 

We have seen that Kyd was a shallow philos- 
opher. He studied passions, not men. He 
meant to represent Hamlet as doing just what 
he ought to do; but his Hamlet was primarily 
a personified craving for revenge. Like Hie- 
ronimo, he belonged not to real life but to the 
conventional world of the old revenge tragedy, 
and his passions and desires were regulated 
(and in Kyd's scheme were to be judged) by 
that world's conventional standards. 

This vi ew c ould jiot Jnterest Shakespeare ; 
but much else in the play interested him deeply. 
He found there a noble, capable, and strong 
man, a man in every way admirable, suddenly 
called upon to dedicate himself to a savage 
passion. The call is the most urgent one con- 



go Shakespeare's Hamlet 

ceivable, proceeding from his father's grave; 
and the hero obeys it and gives his life in the 
pursuit of his revenge. This was the story 
Shakespeare had to tell, and our question is : 
how would he be likely to tell it? 

He would be likely to repeat substantially as 
he found them all facts that interested him ; 
he would make no change, even in characteriza- 
tion, except such as the situation itself sug- 
gested, or such as were necessitated by his own 
larger views of life; but he certainly could not 
take over the shallow psychology of Kyd. He 
would follow Kyd in presenting an admirably 
heroic youth driven to vengeance by an irre- 
sistible impulse; but he would emancipate him- 
self wholly from Kyd when he came to consider 
how the youth would feel about it. Shake- 
speare's hero would not be an incarnate demon 
of revenge, and the conventional standards of 
the revenge tragedy would be thrown over- 
board. Hamlet himself says, "Give me that 
man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear 
him in my heart's core." Those words, as 
everybody perceives, seem to express Shake- 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 91 

speare's own mature ideal of manhood; and it 
is that ideal that we should expect to see put 
to the test in Hamlet. 

In Kyd's play the hero was kept waiting 
several weeks, but his opportunity came at last. 
Shakespeare, I believe, meant to tell the same 
story, but to present the man's life and emo- 
tional experiences as they must really have 
been during the interim. He has slighted the 
obstacles, for he was not interested in them; 
and they might be taken for granted. The 
interesting problem was how it would feel to 
be in Hamlet's place. The sensitive, affection- 
ate, impulsive character of Hamlet has already 
sprung to light in Shakespeare's imagination, 
out of the pretence of madness ; and the an- 
swer to the present problem is that such a man 
in such a situation would be in an almost hope- 
less quandary. At times he would be all for 
blood, for in the best of us the brutish pas- 
sions are still strong; but in the best of us 
such moods are not enduring, and there would 
be times when Hamlet could hardly persuade 
himself back into his fury if he tried. He 



92 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

achieves his revenge; he achieves it, indeed, as 
soon as circumstances permit; but that is not 
the point. The point is that, looking down 
deep into his soul, we see him achieving it in 
spite of almost infinite reluctance. 

Such, I think, was Shakespeare's conception 
of his hero. I cannot believe that his Hamlet 
is to blame for any irresoluteness. If we judge 
him by the standards that prevail in The 
Spanish Tragedy, and especially if we accept 
the data of the play as a complete account of 
the situation, we must condemn Hamlet for not 
taking the life of Claudius at once. But our 
judgments are not regulated by those stand- 
ards, and we know that the play tells the story 
but imperfectly. 

The Coleridgeans, I think, read Hamlet's 
character just as Shakespeare read it, except 
for their imputation of a feeble will. They 
have superposed this defect upon the character 
because they have made both the mistakes men- 
tioned in the last paragraph. In the first place, 
they have taken such things as the pretence 
of madness and the journey to England for 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 93 

facts by which Hamlet was to be interpreted; 
and, in the second place, they have judged that 
he falls short of perfection just in so far as 
he falls short of the pre-Shakespearean ideal 
of the avenger. 

So far as we know, it never occurred to 
Shakespeare that Hamlet was incapable of 
achieving any task, however great, if he wanted 
to; or that, in the present instance, he ought 
to have been more eager than he was. In a 
sense, Shakespeare did with the character ex- 
actly what Kyd had done; that is, he let Ham- 
let behave exactly as he imagined a noble- 
minded prince would behave under the circum- 
stances. Kyd, however, saw the story in the 
lime-light of a conventional stage, while Shake- 
speare saw it in the light of a profound knowl- 
edge of human nature. 

If at a spiritualistic seance your own father's 
spirit should summon you to kill your uncle, 
how would you feel? You probably do not 
believe in spiritualism, just as Shakespeare 
probably did not believe in ghosts; but if you 
can waive your disbelief, you will see that the 



94 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

situation presents a very pretty problem. I 
think you will also see that Shakespeare's solu- 
tion is much more plausible than Kyd's, and 
that it implies no disparagement whatever of 
Hamlet's strength of mind. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Sbaftespeare's Ibamlet (Continued)* 

A slight confirmation of my view of Hamlet 
is found in those curious lines about conscience 
which were added in Shakespeare's second ver- 
sion.* The ethical idea had by that time be- 
come of interest to Shakespeare, though there- 
tofore it had not been prominently before him. 
In his first conception, the question was not one 
for debate as to what Hamlet ought to do; it 
was rather a question for dramatic intuition 
as to what he would do and how he would feel. 
But moral scruples could not be far away 
from a character thus conceived. There was 
not merely the possible doubt whether Hamlet 
had a right to kill Claudius if he wished to, 
there was also the doubt whether he was bound 
to do so if he did not. Both doubts are ex- 
pressed in Hamlet's question to Horatio, and 
*Ante, p. 29. 
95 



96 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

both are natural developments from the con- 
ception which I have imputed to Shakespeare. 
Conversely, their presence in the Second Quarto 
strengthens the belief that that was really his 
conception, for any other would have been less 
likely to receive these particular accretions. 

The conception which I attribute to Shake- 
speare is really the popular conception. Au- 
diences do not condemn Hamlet as a weakling; 
they are with him all the time. This is because 
they take unconsciously the same common- 
sense attitude that Shakespeare took. Theories 
like those of Coleridge and Werder are elab- 
orated by close students of the text, reasoning, 
as we have seen, from irreconcilable data. 
They would hardly suggest themselves to a 
first-night audience, and it was for the first- 
night audience that Shakespeare wrote. The 
play is perhaps the most striking example of 
Shakespeare's makeshift methods, but it is also 
a most striking proof of his genius ; for he 
has portrayed his hero so vividly that the glar- 
ing inconsistencies of the plot pass unnoticed, 
and unsophisticated audiences get precisely the 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 97 

effect intended. They admire and pity the 
hero, and they do not blame him. It is only 
the closet student that detects the flaws of the 
plot and unjustly lays the blame on the hero's 
shoulders. 

The Coleridgean theory is supported by 
many passages to which I have as yet made no 
reference; but none, I think, offer any serious 
difficulty. Either they have been misunder- 
stood, or they are merely embarrassing legacies 
from Kyd's play. The first which I shall con- 
sider belongs to the former class. 

Hamlet's celebrated instructions to the play- 
ers are counted as supporting Coleridge's 
theory. How extraordinary, say the theorists, 
that Hamlet's wits go so far afield in their 
wool-gathering ! Now, at last, he has some- 
thing to do, and a normal man would be strain- 
ing every nerve for the test; but Hamlet's 
coaching is utterly irrelevant; it is an abstract 
discussion of the general principles of art ! 
Or perhaps he descends to the concrete and 
tells the clown not to go outside of his part; 
but, as we afterwards learn, there is no clown's 



98 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

part in the Mouse-Trap ! Here, argue the Cole- 
ridgeans, Shakespeare's purpose to damn his 
hero is most apparent. Even at a critical 
emergency, Hamlet cannot keep to the issue; 
his practical energies are swallowed up in gen- 
eral reflections. 

But of course we must remember that the 
audience have not yet seen The Mouse-Trap. 
They do not know that there is to be no clown. 
Hamlet seems to be coaching thoroughly and 
energetically. Afterwards, to be sure, if we 
reflect, we shall see that very little of his ad- 
vice was particularly relevant to this curious 
play ; but who is likely to think back in this 
way? We must credit Shakespeare with the 
intent to produce the impression which he 
actually produces, namely, that Hamlet is a 
practical man of rare sense as well as wide 
culture. And of course Shakespeare seizes the 
opportunity to say more things than the pur- 
poses of his plot demand. 

The trouble here is simply that many critics 
are out of touch with the stage, and forget 
that the scene in question is drama, not history. 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 99 

Another passage which is often similarly mis- 
interpreted is that which tells of Hamlet's 
escape from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It 
is not easy to justify the forgery and murder, 
even by the questionable plea of self-defence ; 
and from the light-hearted carelessness of Ham- 
let's narration it is possible to infer I know 
not what bugs and goblins in his character. 
But no such inferences are legitimate here, and 
no moral justification of Hamlet's act is needed. 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor and 
rather tiresome personages. Their death is not 
exhibited on the stage, and little emphasis is 
placed on it even in narration. Under the cir- 
cumstances, our uppermost feeling is that we 
are glad to have them die, and we congratulate 
Hamlet upon his cleverness. Shakespeare 
sees life in the light of intense moral con- 
victions, but, as Professor Raleigh has delight- 
fully impressed upon us, the light does not 
always illumine the backgrounds of his pic- 
ture. 

The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is a trump 
card for the Coleridgeans. Professor Brad- 



ioo Shakespeare's Hamlet 

ley comments on it as follows: "Hamlet en- 
ters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for 
some time he supposes himself to be alone. 
What is he thinking of? 'The murder of 
Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, 
and on which everything depends? Not at all. 
He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that 
what stands in the way of it, and counterbal- 
ances its infinite attraction, is not any thought 
of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the 
doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether 
it is not ignoble in the mind to end its mis- 
ery, and still more, whether death would end 
it." 

Is it true that Hamlet is here meditating 
suicide? I rather accept the interpretation of 
the soliloquy originated by the sturdy common- 
sense of Dr. Johnson. Hamlet is thinking not 
of committing suicide but of actively pursuing 
his revenge. The latter course, he knows, is 
a dangerous one; and hence he queries whether 
it is better patiently to endure outrage or 
valiantly to throw away life in the effort to 
right it: 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 101 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles 
And by opposing end them? 

How can the words "by opposing end them" 
mean suicide? Hamlet adds that the question 
is made doubly serious by the uncertainty of 
conditions beyond the grave. But for this con- 
sideration, he says, many of the poor and op- 
pressed would seek a voluntary death; but 
there is here no reference to himself. He does 
not return to his individual concerns unless 
perhaps at the very end of the soliloquy, where 
he seems to say, in effect: "The uncertainty 
that unnerves the would-be suicide is the same 
thing that partly daunts me, the would-be 
avenger." 

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry. 

The soliloquy, thus understood, is a perfectly 
natural one for the Hamlet of my interpre- 
tation. Such a train of thought might pass 



102 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

through his mind at any time, but it is es- 
pecially appropriate now, for it is the eve of 
action. The Mouse-Trap is Hamlet's first 
overt act, 'and amounts virtually to a declara- 
tion of war. He is not shrinking; he has al- 
ready partly committed himself, and the next 
time we see him he is making final preparations. 
The soliloquy shows only that he faces the situ- 
ation intelligently and deliberately. He is like 
a duelist who, in the act of crossing swords, 
remarks ironically to himself: "This is a very 
questionable business that I am engaged in." 

In the First Quarto this soliloquy precedes 
the arrival of the pla3 r ers. It thus shows Ham- 
let's mind before he has devised a test of the 
King's guilt and before there is prospect of 
immediate action. Curiously enough, too, the 
passage from the second line to the eighth (in- 
cluding my first quotation) is omitted. There 
is no suggestion that Hamlet is meditating 
vengeance. Unless we are misled by printers' 
omissions, the Hamlet of the First Quarto is 
certainly meditating suicide. 

With this soliloquy, as we find it in the First 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 103 

and Second Quartos respectively, we must com- 
pare the two versions of another soliloquy. 
There is a passage in the first act in which, 
according to the Second Quarto, Hamlet cer- 
tainly does meditate suicide, while according to 
the First he certainly does not; so that the 
curious conditions shown in the "to be or not 
to be" soliloquy are exactly reversed. 

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, 
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed 
His canon 'gainst sel f -slaughter ! 

The reading of the First Quarto is as follows: 



O, that this too much grieved and sallied flesh 
Would melt to nothing, or that the universal 
Globe of heaven would turn all to a Chaos! 



Now is it likely that these oddly reciprocal 
discrepancies between the two versions are due 
to imperfect transcription? Or may we say 
that they existed between the versions as 
Shakespeare actually wrote them? I think we 
may. The case last cited is clear, for the First 



104 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

Quarto shows no gap; it has a substituted 
clause which is quite intelligible, though en- 
tirely different from the clause about self- 
slaughter. It is pretty certain, therefore, that 
the latter was an afterthought. In the case of 
the "to be or not to be" soliloquy I feel less cer- 
tain, but I think a similar conclusion is suffi- 
ciently warranted. At the point in the First 
Quarto at which the soliloquy occurs, there was 
no special impropriety in Hamlet's thinking 
of suicide ; and there would have been no special 
propriety in his thinking of the danger of his 
task. At the point to which the soliloquy is 
transposed in the Second Quarto, there is a 
special propriety in his thinking of the danger, 
as I have just pointed out ; while the inferences 
of Professor Bradley show the remarkable im- 
propriety in his thinking of suicide. All this 
seems unlikely to be chance coincidence. 

What really happened was probably this : 
When Shakespeare first rewrote Kyd's play, he 
allowed Hamlet to think of suicide at a point 
after the Ghost's revelation and before the ar- 
rival of the players. This may well have been 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 105 

a faithful copying of Kyd, and Hamlet's rea- 
son for thinking of suicide, like Hieronimo's, 
was his despair of accomplishing his revenge. 
When Shakespeare made his final revision of 
the play he canceled this incident, for, with the 
external difficulty of Hamlet's task, his motive 
for suicide had vanished from the foreground 
of Shakespeare's imagination. A fleeting sug- 
gestion of suicide was inserted, however, before 
the interview with the Ghost, and the soliloquy 
in which the suggestion had formerly occurred 
was transposed to a point just before the 
Mouse-Trap, and converted into a reflection 
upon the gravity of the impending crisis. 
After the Hamlet of the revised version has 
once learned of the task that is put upon him, 
he talks no more of self-slaughter; that notion 
flits across his mind only when there is nothing 
else to occupy it but idle melancholy. Of 
course all these careful readjustments could 
hardly have been made if Shakespeare had been 
trying to show Hamlet's incapacity for action. 
After the Mouse-Trap there remains no rea- 
son for delay that Shakespeare cares to empha- 



106 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

size, and in consequence Hamlet's mind seems 
now more settled. There is no more of the old 
impotent self-reproach, except in a single solil- 
oquy which I shall discuss shortly. Hamlet 
talks more openly to his mother, to Rosencrantz 
and Guildenstern, and to Polonius. When we 
compare this virtual unmasking with his pre- 
vious diplomatic reserve, it seems clear that he 
now intends present action. Heretofore he has 
never intended anything of the sort. He has 
seemed to reproach himself for the harrowing 
delay and has vehemently urged himself to do 
something; but he has never expected to act 
soon, for he has seen that there was nothing 
to be done. Clearly his change of attitude is 
due to the success of the Mouse-Trap. He 
spoke truly when he said that if Claudius should 
but blench he knew his course ; and he now 
means to seize his first opportunity. He does 
not seize it, for it comes when Claudius is 
praying, and the Hamlet of the plot is too 
superstitious to kill him on his knees ; but an- 
other opportunity seems to offer itself when 
he thinks the King is eaves-dropping, and Ham- 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 107 

let thrusts his rapier through the arras with- 
out an instant's hesitation. 

The soliloquy referred to in the last para- 
graph is uttered just as Hamlet goes to take 
ship. It ends with the resolution to be "bloody 
or be nothing worth," discussed in an earlier 
chapter. This soliloquy is missing in the First 
Quarto, and was added when the pirate capture 
was devised. Its meaning becomes clear only 
when it is studied in connection with that 
incident. 

The fundamental difficulty here is that in- 
volved in Hamlet's ready acquiescence in the 
journey to England. It has been hard hitherto 
to account for this except as a striking illus- 
tration of Coleridge's theory; and under Cole- 
ridge's theory the farewell soliloquy proved too 
much, for it proved Hamlet an idiot. Some bet- 
ter explanation must be found. 

A naive explanation would be that if Ham- 
let had not gone away the play could not have 
continued through two more acts, for matters 
were coming rapidly to a head. I do not re- 
member whether anyone has actually offered 



108 Shakespeare's Hamlet 

this explanation ; but Mr. Bernard Shaw might 
have done so, and it contains a smack of the 
absurd good sense for which he is distinguished. 
In Belleforest and Kyd, as we have seen, the 
journey to England was satisfactorily ac- 
counted for ; Hamlet went because he could not 
help himself. As the story changed in the re- 
telling, the skeleton of this particular incident 
remained, though the flesh and blood had dried 
away. It was a troublesome impediment, but 
Shakespeare could not renounce it, for it was 
an integral part of his whole inheritance. It 
was literally true that the play could not go 
on without it. 

In his first version Shakespeare made no se- 
rious effort to cope with the difficulty; but in 
his final revision he invented simultaneously the 
pirate capture, Hamlet's foreknowledge and 
confident assurance of success (as revealed in 
his talk with the Queen), and the soliloquy now 
in question. All these passages may easily be 
regarded as inspired by a common purpose, 
namely to represent Hamlet as still fully mind- 
ful of his task. If Shakespeare had received 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 109 

all these passages as legacies from Kyd, and 
had himself invented Hamlet's calm acquiescence 
in the departure for England, I should judge 
that the latter was devised to make Hamlet'a 
speeches ridiculous ; but as precisely the oppo- 
site is true, and the speeches are Shakespeare's 
own contributions to the total effect, I accept 
them at their face value and judge that they 
were devised to smooth over the difficulties of 
the situation and induce us to overlook them. 
The device was not a happy one, and the solil- 
oquy in particular might well provoke question 
in a careful reader's mind ; and it is likely that 
Shakespeare observed this, for the soliloquy is 
omitted again in the Folios. It was unques- 
tionably written by Shakespeare, but either by 
him or by his authorized editors it was subse- 
quently canceled. 

My view of Hamlet robs the tragedy of a 
certain significance, but it is a kind of signifi- 
cance that we have no right to demand. The 
Coleridgeans say that the hero's infirmity justi- 
fies the tragic ending of the play. It is his 
"tragic fault," and, like Macbeth's ambition or 



iio Shakespeare's Hamlet 

the pride of Coriolanus, it entails his ruin. But 
Professor Baker has sufficiently shown that the 
tragic fault, though demanded by some critics, 
was not deemed indispensable by Shakespeare. 
He told a story, he did not philosophize about 
it. He usually kept the ending as he found it ; 
but when he did make a change, as in King 
Lear and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, it 
was not for ethical reasons, it was to secure 
artistic harmony with the spirit of the narra- 
tive. Cordelia does not deserve to die, but her 
death "goes" well in the play; or at any rate 
Shakespeare thought so when he devised it. 

In a revenge play it was artistically neces- 
sary that the hero should die in achieving his 
purpose. Thus, to give a hypothetical illus- 
tration, Shakespeare might have made a re- 
venge tragedy out of Holinshed's story of Mac- 
beth by simply making Macduff the hero in- 
stead of the King; and if he had done so the 
etiquette of the literary species would have de- 
manded that both Macbeth and Macduff 
should die in the fight at Dunsinane. So when 
Kyd dramatized Belleforest's novel he, as a 



Shakespeare's Hamlet 1 1 1 

matter of course, sacrificed his hero at the end 
of the play. In Kyd, be it remembered, there 
is no hint of weakness in Hamlet's character. 

It cannot have occurred to Shakespeare 
either that the ending should be altered or that 
it needed any profounder justification than 
was already provided. That justification, as 
I have explained, seems to me artistic rather 
than ethical; but the difference, after all, is 
chiefly a difference in terms. If the philosophi- 
cal critics demand an ethical basis for every 
play, they may find one for Hamlet even under 
my interpretation. The hero of a revenge 
tragedy, they may say, dies because he cher- 
ishes an unholy passion. Shakespeare's Ham- 
let, seen from this point of view, is exactly like 
Kyd's, and I will concede that he dies because 
of his tragic fault; but I insist that the fault 
is not his reluctance to avenge his father 
promptly, it is his willingness to do so at all. 



CHAPTER IX 

©pbella 

Hamlet's curious conduct in Ophelia's 
closet, as described by her to Polonius, has 
proved as puzzling to the critics as it was to 
the lady herself. Some have held that he was 
led thither by the pure ecstasy of love, that 
he was indulging his eager desire merely to 
look upon her face, and that the disorder of 
his dress and the eccentricity of his behavior 
were natural and unstudied symptoms of his 
passion. Others have gone a little farther, 
and held that Hamlet is here taking a last 
farewell; for under the burden of his task he 
recognizes that love and wedded felicity are 
not for him, and that he must tear her out of 
his heart forever. 

The latter interpretation is consistent with 
the Coleridgean theory, for it is not clear that 



Ophelia 1 1 3 

Hamlet need make any such renunciation. 
Belief orest's hero, who has a much more difficult 
task than Shakespeare's, actually marries on the 
eve of his vengeance. If Shakespeare's Hamlet 
is giving up the love of Ophelia by a deliberate 
effort, it must be because he magnifies to him- 
self the demands of his situation. He has 
not the strength to act, but his preparations 
for action are huge. All that he holds most 
dear is sacrificed to his impotent purpose in 
advance. 

My own interpretation of the incident is less 
romantic. I think that Hamlet's sole purpose 
is to deceive. Ophelia's story to Polonius is 
the first news of Hamlet in the second act, and 
the first act closed upon his resolve to feign 
madness. The effect of this sequence cannot 
be blinked. The audience know that Hamlet 
intends "to put an antic disposition on," and 
they are waiting to see him begin. Ophelia 
rushes in. "Oh, my Lord, I have been so af- 
frighted! Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all 
unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings 
fouled," etc., etc. Any intelligent listener 



ii4 Ophelia 

must connect this scene with the last; and so, 
I think, must Shakespeare have intended. 

That such was the meaning of the scene in 
Kyd is clear from the German play. In the 
first act Hamlet announces his resolve to feign 
madness. In Act II Ophelia runs to Coram- 
bus and the King and cries: "Alas, father, 
protect me! Prince Hamlet plagues me. He 
lets me have no peace." Hamlet himself is seen 
following her, and the King and Corambus hide 
behind the arras. Then comes the nunnery 
scene; and the scene which follows immediately 
after begins with Hamlet's saying to Horatio: 
"My worthy friend, through this assumed mad- 
ness I hope to get the opportunity of revenging 
my father's death." 

The First Quarto corroborates the testimony 
of the German play. Ophelia enters in alarm 
and Corambis asks what is the news. She pref- 
aces her narrative of the facts with a state- 
ment of her conclusion : 

O young Prince Hamlet, the only flower of Denmark, 

He is bereft of all the wealth he had; 

The jewel that adorned his feature most 

Is filched and stolen away; his wit's bereft him. 



Ophelia 1 1 5 

Then follows her narrative of Hamlet's visit 
to her closet. As in the Second Quarto and the 
German play, this is the first news of Hamlet 
since his resolve to feign madness. 

There was an impropriety in giving to 
Ophelia the lines just quoted, for in the ensuing 
scenes it appears that Hamlet's madness has 
been under observation for some time. The 
King is troubled about it, and has already sum- 
moned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as detect- 
ives. The fact of Hamlet's madness is well 
known ; only the cause remains obscure. 
Ophelia, therefore, had no business announcing 
it as a new thing. She did so only because 
it was in Shakespeare's mind that this would 
indeed be the first announcement to the audi- 
ence. In the final revision the error is partly 
corrected. Ophelia merely tells the bare facts 
about Hamlet's visit, and Polonius infers that 
the cause of his madness is love. In the next 
scene, both in the final version and in the First 
Quarto, Polonius accordingly announces to the 
King that he has discovered "the very cause 
of Hamlet's lunacy." 



1 1 6 Ophelia 

Thus it appears that the slight change in 
the revised version was intended only to cor- 
rect an error; Shakespeare was not altering 
the scene in its main significance. There is, 
I think, only one possible difference between 
Shakespeare's understanding of the facts and 
Kyd's ; and in the existence of even that dif- 
ference I have no confidence. In Kyd's play 
it is possible that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia 
was the first revelation of his supposed mad- 
ness. In Shakespeare's play it is certainly an 
afterthought of Hamlet's. He has for some 
time feigned madness in a general way, and 
Claudius suspects him. Hamlet now sees that 
he must give his madness a specific and harm- 
less character; and accordingly he pretends 
that it springs from slighted love. 

All these considerations cast a taint upon 
the genuineness of Hamlet's love for Ophelia. 
His treatment of her can no longer be explained 
as due to a lover's agony. It is cold-blooded 
and deliberate. Besides, how could we ever 
have supposed that Hamlet misread Ophelia's 
simple nature, as the common exegesis assumes 



Ophelia 117 

that he did? His behavior is sufficiently heart- 
less in any view, but if he loved her it is in- 
explicable. 

Some other indications point the same way. 
How is it that Hamlet always treats Polonius 
with ridicule and contempt? Modern sentiment 
does not tolerate such indecency in a lover; 
and if we question whether Shakespeare could 
share our delicacy in such matters we have only 
to consult Romeo or Ferdinand. Shakespeare 
knew the gentleman's code as well as we do. 
But, above all, we find in Hamlet's soliloquies 
the plainest indication that he cared nothing 
for Ophelia. The soliloquy is used by Shake- 
speare to show us the most secret thoughts of 
his characters ; and in Hamlet's most secret 
thoughts Ophelia is never once present. 

On the other hand, Ophelia tells Polonius in 
the first act that Hamlet hath importuned her 
with love in honorable fashion, and hath given 
countenance to his speech with almost all the 
holy vows of heaven. Polonius attaches little 
importance to this; but we know Hamlet bet- 
ter than he does, and we cannot believe him a 



1 1 8 Ophelia 

villain. In the fifth act Hamlet himself tells 
his mother that he loved Ophelia more than 
forty thousand brothers. Now in spite of his 
palpable lie to Laertes (which has given much 
unnecessary trouble) we know that Hamlet is 
no liar. Must we not, then, believe him here? 

It is easy to find an explanation of these 
inconsistencies that will be partly satisfactory. 
Ophelia, we may say, is a rare sweet girl, but 
by no means the woman to take deep hold upon 
Hamlet's affections. He loved her once, but 
only as one loves a child or a flower. When 
his father lived, and he was young in experience 
as well as in years, she fascinated his sentimen- 
tal fancy with her flower-like beauty. Though 
his heart was never deeply engaged, he could 
yet be honest in all the vows he made her — 
honest, though mistaken. Now, however, man- 
hood has been thrust suddenly upon him and 
the summer days are ended. It was the poetical 
boy in Hamlet that loved Ophelia; the serious 
man never did, and does not now. Yet in a 
moment of sudden shock, as when he learns 
that it is her grave over which he has been 



Ophelia 1 1 9 

grimly jesting, memories of his former fancy 
overwhelm him ; and in his words to the Queen, 
though he is as mistaken as before, he is, as 
before, entirely sincere. 

This explanation is only partly satisfactory. 
If it accounts for Hamlet's failure ever to 
think about Ophelia, it does little towards 
reconciling us to his cruel use of her. More- 
over, a still more serious objection can be made 
against it. If the story of Ophelia means no 
more than this, what is its pertinence to the 
rest of the play? The subsidiary plot becomes 
interesting only from Ophelia's point of view ; 
she is the heroine of a little tragedy of her 
own, which to Hamlet is a matter of indiffer- 
ence. The interest of the tragedy is not 
increased, but merely divided, by the complica- 
tion. It is as if, in the middle of Romeo and 
Juliet, Shakespeare had devoted several scenes 
to the desolation and despair of Rosaline. 

There are other difficulties connected with 
Ophelia, but as they perhaps depend upon sub- 
jective judgments, it would be unwise to em- 
phasize them. I refer to such things as her 



1 20 Ophelia 

madness. What causes it? It is ascribed in. 
the play to her father's death; but I myself 
cannot feel that this is a sufficient cause. She 
appears twice in conversation with her father, 
but on neither occasion is any fondness shown 
between them; and neither speaks of the other 
with affection. It would be easier to under- 
stand her insanity if she knew that Polonius 
was slain by her lover, but that fact seems to 
have been kept secret. Hamlet's own supposed 
madness and consequent harshness to her might 
conceivably explain her disorder; but they are 
not assigned as causes in the play. Her mad- 
ness, therefore, seems a rather conventional 
device for disposing of her. 

For all these reasons we conclude that the 
true story of Ophelia is not fully told in 
Shakespeare's play. It may have been a con- 
sistent part of Kyd's scheme, but Shakespeare 
failed to work it out, and we have in his text 
only the disjecta membra of the original epi- 
sode. For this reason the inferences that have 
ordinarily been drawn about Hamlet's char- 
acter from his treatment of Ophelia are un- 



Ophelia 121 

warrantable and probably misleading. Those 
inferences have been somewhat at variance with 
my view of Shakespeare's purpose, and I have 
therefore thought it best to devote this whole 
final chapter to an analysis of the story. It 
remains only to explore the genesis of this story, 
and so to find a specific explanation of Shake- 
speare's negligence. It will be possible in this 
way, I believe, to clear up most of our 
difficulties. 

In the German Hamlet Ophelia apparently 
goes mad before it is known that her father 
is dead. It is nowhere suggested that his 
death had anything to do with her calamity. 
Her ravings are all about an unnamed lover, 
for whom she is perpetually mistaking somebody 
else. One would suppose that this lover must 
be Hamlet, but this is by no means clear. She 
has shown no interest in Hamlet. She mentions 
him only once, and that is in her complaint to 
Corambus : "Alas, father, protect me ! Prince 
Hamlet plagues me. He lets me have no peace." 
Hamlet, too, shows no real interest in Ophelia. 
As I have said above, he pretends to have gone 



122 Ophelia 

mad with love of her; but there is no sugges- 
tion that his love was anything more than a 
pretence. For his declaration at the grave, 
in Shakespeare's play, and for the holy vows 
with which Shakespeare's Ophelia says he 
wooed her, the German author gives no equiva- 
lents. Ophelia's insanity is a ludicrously con- 
ventional piece of play-making. She seems to 
be in the play only to supply a second female 
part and to give Hamlet a chance for feigning 
madness. When she has served the dramatist's 
purpose she goes mad herself and commits 
suicide. 

Kyd, of course, cannot have perpetrated 
such silliness as this. The fault is with "the 
German adapter, or perhaps even with subse- 
quent abridgments of his work. Moreover, 
the German play is so different in these particu- 
lars from Shakespeare's that comparison of the 
two affords no certainty as to what Kyd did 
write. It is clear only that Kyd's Hamlet used 
Ophelia to explain his madness, that in the 
nunnery scene he cast her off in a feigned 
rage, and that she went mad and killed her- 



Ophelia 123 

self. Whether Kyd's Hamlet really loved 
Ophelia, and, if he did, why he cast her off, 
are questions which must be answered con- 
jecturally. 

But as to the first of these questions con- 
jecture may be confident. Hamlet must have 
loved Ophelia, and Kyd must have conceived 
their unhappy relations as an integral part of 
Hamlet's tragedy. Otherwise Kyd would 
hardly have invented the story at all; and the 
isolated intimations that Shakespeare gives in 
his first and fifth acts are not likely to have 
been interpolated gratuitously. 

It is less easy to see why Kyd's Hamlet cast 
off his Ophelia. There are several ways in 
which Kyd might have conceived the affair, 
and our data are too vague for a decisive choice 
between them. Perhaps Hamlet deliberately 
sacrificed his hope of happiness in love, lest it 
should interfere with his revenge. Perhaps 
there was no deliberation, but love died a 
natural death as Hamlet's heart filled with the 
darker passion. Or — and for this ingenious 
and plausible suggestion I am indebted to a 



1 24 Ophelia 

friend and fellow-student* — perhaps Hamlet 
acted deliberately but with no distinctly prac- 
tical motive; perhaps, without psychological 
analysis, Kyd merely manipulated his hero 
according to the etiquette of revenge tragedy. 
Hamlet cast off Ophelia because it was fitting 
that his decks should be thoroughly cleared for 
action. 

Whichever of these suggestions we accept, 
Shakespeare's treatment of the theme can now 
be intelligibly explained. If Kyd's story was 
sheer stage convention, it could hardly appeal 
to Shakespeare ; he left Hamlet's affection little 
more than a form of words because he was 
not convinced of its depth. If Kyd's Hamlet 
made a deliberate sacrifice to his revenge, this 
too would seem to Shakespeare more conven- 
tional than real, and he could follow Kyd only 
half-heartedly. And whether the sacrifice was 
deliberate or not, any process by which the 
passion of revenge supplanted in Hamlet's 
heart a genuine passion of love would hardly 
be reproduced by Shakespeare, for it would 
*Miss E. W. Manwaring. 



Ophelia 125 

necessitate a very different treatment of the 
passion of revenge from that which he was 
driven to adopt. Kyd's Hamlet was possessed, 
and might do all that became a monomaniac; 
but Shakespeare's Hamlet could do only what 
may become a man. 

Hamlet's conduct, too, was cruel. The dis- 
courtesy and the inhumanity that he shows in 
Shakespeare's play are certain not to have been 
more softly presented by Kyd. They were 
proper enough in the hero of a pre-Shake- 
spearean tragedy ; for there the design was to 
exhibit passions rather than persons, and an 
audience sympathetically consumed with the 
blood-thirst would care little for the amenities 
of good society. But Shakespeare's effort was 
to realize character. What could he do with 
such unpliant material as this? 

Finally, Shakespeare was just now not in- 
terested in love-stories. He was writing plays 
like Julius Casar and Measure for Measure, 
in which love played no part, or like Troilus 
and Cressida, in which it is strangely des- 
ecrated. His springtime of romance was 



126 Ophelia 

ended and his Indian summer had not begun. 
Some half-dozen years, earlier a pathetic tale 
of two star-crossed lovers had sufficiently typi- 
fied to him the tragic meanings of life; but 
now other issues looked larger. Hamlet's man- 
ner of bearing the hideous burden of his re- 
venge was the theme of this story. It was a 
subject never before worked out, and to Shake- 
speare it was profoundly interesting; but for 
the unintelligible love-story he cared nothing. 
The two motives of this tragedy might seem 
incongruous to anyone, but they would cer- 
tainly seem so to Shakespeare in his present 
mood. 

My conclusions may be briefly summed up. 
If for the moment we designate by the name 
Hamlet not Shakespeare's hero but the com- 
posite hero of all the versions, we can properly 
say that this ideal and conceptual Hamlet truly 
loved Ophelia, and that he renounced her for 
reasons which hardly admit clear statement, 
since they belong as much to the laws of the 
Elizabethan stage as to the laws of human 
nature. Shakespeare, however, was indifferent 



Ophelia 127 

to this part of the story, and wherever he was 
working with a free hand he ignored it. He 
did not omit the love theme, for it was in the 
play already and he had no leisure for com- 
plete reconstruction ; but he grievously scanted 
it because he found it troublesome and unman- 
ageable. Thus it comes about that Hamlet 
sometimes protests that he loves Ophelia pas- 
sionately, but most of the time acts as if she 
were a matter of indifference to him. Perhaps 
we can most comfortably reconcile ourselves 
to Hamlet's behavior by saying that the indif- 
ference is not his but Shakespeare's, while the 
passion and the cruelty are not Shakespeare's 
but Kyd's. 



CHAPTER X 

Summary 

The tragedy that has come down to us as 
Shakespeare's is not wholly his. It is like a 
late reconstruction of an early medieval cathe- 
dral, wherein the aspiring design of a great 
Gothic architect is but half distinguishable 
among the uncouth piers and arches of his 
Saxon and Norman predecessors. My plan of 
research has been by analysis of the con- 
glomerate mass to distinguish its successive 
accretions in chronological order, and then to 
appraise the purposes of the latest artist by 
themselves. 

In the existing tragedy we find two distinct 
heroes imperfectly melted into one. Kyd's 
Hamlet and Shakespeare's Hamlet, taken sep- 
arately, are comparatively simple and intel- 
ligible persons; but the Kyd-Shakespeare com- 
pound is a "monstr'-horrend'-inform'-ingen- 
128 



Summary 129 

dous" mystery, cut lumen ademption. Kyd's 
Hamlet does most of the deeds of the play, and 
Shakespeare's Hamlet thinks most of the 
thoughts. Kyd is responsible for most of the 
plot, and Shakespeare for most of the charac- 
terization ; Kyd for the hero's actual environ- 
ment, Shakespeare for the imperfect descrip- 
tion of his environment that has come down to 
us. Thus the Kyd-Shakespeare composite hero 
follows up one man's thoughts with another 
man's deeds, and confronts with Shakespeare's 
soul a situation of Kyd's devising. 

The complexity of this compound is further 
confused by the complexity of one of the com- 
ponents ; for Kyd's Hamlet himself was an ill- 
assorted blend of Kyd and Belleforest. This 
fact, indeed, is the first cause of the greatness 
of the existing tragedy, as well as of its de- 
fects ; for it was the irrational behavior of 
Kyd's hero that piqued Shakespeare's curiosity 
and drove him to depart as far from Kyd as 
Kyd had departed from Belleforest. But if 
we want a clear conception of Shakespeare's 
own Hamlet, we must put out of our minds 



1 30 Summary 

those parts of the play which belong to the 
Hamlets of Belleforest and Kyd. Those parts 
are important as clues to guide us in running 
down Shakespeare's meaning, but we must not 
treat them as direct evidence by which his 
meaning may be proved. They are direct 
evidence only of the meaning of the Belief orest- 
Kyd-Shakespeare compound; and that com- 
pound is meaningless. It is because this 
condition has been so long overlooked that 
the Hamlet mystery has remained unsolved. 

Shakespeare's purpose was to tell the story 
of Hamlet, and to explain it as he went along; 
and the reason why he failed in the latter part 
of his purpose was that the story was inex- 
plicable. Like many other inexplicable stories, 
however, it was an exceedingly good one; and 
Shakespeare has told a considerable part of it 
supremely well. 

The story included the revelation by the 
Ghost, the feigned madness (with an elaborate 
scene ready-made in which it was planned), the 
doubt of the Ghost's veracity, and the stirring 
demonstration thereof by The Mouse-Trap. 



Summary 131 

It included also the dramatic scene with the 
hero's mother, the killing of Polonius, the 
thwarting of the embassy to England, and the 
final riot at the fencing-bout. Into the thick 
of these adventures Shakespeare projected his 
own hero, a young man of ideal excellence in 
general, but with such specific refinements of 
temper as might most nearly explain his pre- 
tence of madness. The very intensity of Shake- 
speare's interest in this hero's inner experiences 
made some essential features of the plot seem 
irrelevant ; and other features were not merely 
irrelevant but actually incongruous. Such 
things Shakespeare slighted; and thus the dif- 
ficulty of Hamlet's task is left out altogether 
save as an occasionally implied assumption, 
while Hamlet's love of Ophelia hovers mistily in 
the background. 

In Timon of Athens (written a few years 
after the final revision of Hamlet) Alcibiades 
pleads at the bar of the Senate for the life of 
a friend who has committed a murder. His 
plea is that the murder was a justifiable act 
of vengeance ; but a wise Senator overrules him. 



132 Summary 

You undergo too strict a paradox, 

Striving to make an ugly deed look fair. 

Your words have took such pains as if they laboured 

To bring manslaughter into form, and set quarreling 

Upon the head of valour; which indeed 

Is valour misbegot and came into the world 

When sects and factions were newly born. 

He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer 

The worst that man can breathe, and make his wrongs 

His outsides, to wear them like his raiment, carelessly, 

And ne'er prefer his injuries to his heart, 

To bring it into danger. 

Shakespeare's Hamlet is by nature the "truly 
valiant" man of this Senator's philosophy. He 
would never willingly prefer his injuries to his 
heart, nor bring his heart into danger by 
cherishing an alien passion; but the injuries 
are preferred for him by his father's spirit, 
and the passion is commended to him by filial 
love. He therefore accepts his mission, and 
achieves it, in spite of its repugnancy. It is 
this that makes him a tragic hero. 

The theories of Coleridge and Werder are 
attempts to explain the Hamlet of Belleforest, 
Kyd, and Shakespeare. Coleridge finds that 
this Hamlet's delays are due to internal diffi- 
culties, for which he is to blame. Werder finds 



Summary 133 

that they are due to external difficulties, for 
which he is not to blame. If we are asked to 
decide between these theories we must first 
demur on the ground that the composite Ham- 
let is not an entity at all, and therefore not 
a subject for psychological analysis. But if 
this ground of demurrer be waived, we may 
suggest a compromise between the opposing 
theories. We will say with Coleridge that 
Hamlet's difficulties are internal, and with 
Werder that he is not to blame for them; but 
we must add, in disagreement with both dis- 
putants, that these difficulties are not the causes 
of the delay. The causes of the delay are 
those external difficulties which have vanished 
into the fourth dimension. 








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